— Elizabeth Nguyen
Throughout the course of the semester while reading the play, Endgame by Samuel Beckett, was first to understand at first because I didn’t really understand what was going on in the play. After reading it a second time and responding to the questions asked by my other classmates, I started to realize what was actually going on in the play and that I finally got a sense of what actually happened. The term endgame is used to describe the outcome of the game chess, in which the outcome is already known. The author, Beckett is a chess fan, saw the parallel between the chess endgame the final stages of life, and realized that death is the final outcome and regardless of the way a person plays a game, he or she will die. The image of chess is portrayed throughout the play with the colors red and white. The colors red is portrayed with Clov and Hamm and white is portrayed with Nagg and Nell. At first when reading the play, the context was hard for me to understand because when reading a play by yourself it’s hard to understand because you don’t really know exactly what is happening. Doing the response questions from my classmates about the play, it made me re-read the play again and realized what actually was happening and I fully understood what the moral of the play was. Answering the questions from my classmates actually made me realized that nothing is hard to understand after reading it over until you actually understand. Usually when I read plays, it takes me more than twice to actually understand but reading Endgame twice I actually understood what actually happened. Answering questions about the play that my classmates sent to my professor and the requirements that had to be fulfilled for each question made me think outside the box and relating it to my daily life and what I would do if I was in the same situation as the characters in the play. Questions that had to be answered about every text that we have read throughout the semester once distance learning started actually made me reread the text couple of times to actually understand and realize what was going on because it motivated me to actual read and try to understand what the text was trying to say and give me more motivation to do my work. The play Endgame clearly made me connect it to my everyday life about my grandparents because one of the questions that the group asked about wanting to be in a nursing home as we get older got me to actually think about everything about growing old. When I was reading the play a second time, it made me realized that it actually made me realize that the play was actually related to my daily life with the relationship about Clov and and Hamm because their relationship in the play is exactly the same relationship I have with my brother since we were little.
