NELL: Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. But—
NAGG: Oh!
NELL: Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it’s always the same thing. Yes, it’s like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don’t laugh any more. (Pause.) Have you anything else to say to me?
NAGG: No.

Samuel Beckett’s Endgame rang true. It was a mess of inanity scattered with blistering lines like “nothing is funnier than unhappiness.” It hit me where Waiting for Godot hit me a long time ago. The sheer meaninglessness of life. The futility of human will. The emptiness of God. Beckett explores such themes in both works. Absurdist theater isn’t the most accessible stuff around. Waiting for Godot, when it first opened, was largely derided. Audiences walked out. Seasoned critics scoffed. People didn’t get it. But prison inmates did. In 1954, Beckett received a letter from Luttringhausen prison in Germany that reported the play’s triumph. “Your Godot was our Godot,” the anonymous letter writer said. The inmates knew what Waiting for Godot was about because they, unlike the theater critics, could actually see the walls keeping them imprisoned. Beckett’s worldview was bleak and black. One character in Endgame, after an attempt at prayer, cries: “That bastard! He doesn’t exist!” In a world without purpose, where hell is other people, where everything is nothing – the laughter masks a fury so searing that I begin to wonder what kept Beckett going if he really did believe what he wrote. The man might as well have committed suicide. He didn’t, and died an unremarkable death at 83. I suspect he didn’t buy everything he sold. It could have been part of a personal quest for truth. It could have been Beckett’s way of testing, discarding, and refining deep internal conflict. I think of him as generally misunderstood. I picture him a quiet man. A happy man.

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