Guy Tiphane
EN 216
Dr. Davaran
June 10, 2002
As the curtain closes on Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, members of the audience go home and wonder about its meaning. They have been touched by the wide range of contradictions, the silence, the presence and absence of dialogue, the bare stage, by Nagg and Nell popping out of their ashbins. As they open the kitchen cupboard to set up their breakfast table the day after, they may wonder why should it have a combination? And why did Hamm retain the combination of the cupboard, almost as the key (no pun intended) to Clov’s freedom? This paper will explore some of the infinite possibilities of meaning in Beckett’s play.
The combination of the cupboard is first mentioned early in the play (2475[1]):
HAMM Why
don’t you kill me?
CLOV I
don’t know the combination of the cupboard. [Pause.]
What we know so far is that Clov is the only character able to go offstage, into the small cubic kitchen where he stares at the wall waiting for Hamm to call him, using a whistle. Clov also seems to be the only character in control of the space itself: at the start of the play, he opens the curtains, uncovers the ashbins and Hamm. He seems to be at the service of the disabled Hamm. Such a position should call for Clov to have access to the cupboard, or how else could he perform his services? But now, why is not knowing the combination an argument against killing Hamm? Is there a gun or rat poison in the cupboard? Or would simply knowing the combination give Clov his freedom from Hamm? The combination is mentioned again midway through the play (2485):
HAMM Why don’t you finish us? [Pause.] I’ll tell you the combination of the cupboard if you promise to finish me.
CLOV I couldn’t finish you.
HAMM Then you won’t finish me. [Pause.]
I would like to open a parenthesis on the significance of the pronouns, for which I referred to the original version of the play in French[2]. Hamm asks Clov why he does not finish them but promises the combination for finishing him. In response, Clov says he could not finish him, not them. A similar exchange occurs a few lines earlier, using only the plural of “you”:
CLOV Then I’ll leave you.
HAMM You can’t leave us.
CLOV Then
I won’t leave you.
The impossibility of Clov to kill Hamm also appeared earlier when Hamm wanted to be perfectly centered in the room and Clov says “If I could kill him I’d die happy” (2482). Supposing Clov is not talking about the rat in the kitchen, it just seems that Clov’s role, his purpose, does not include the possibility of finishing, or leaving, Hamm. Getting the combination of the cupboard cannot help Clov to kill Hamm and cannot help him to get his freedom and leave. They both agree about this dependence (2495):
HAMM Gone
from me you’d be dead.
CLOV And
vice-versa.
The combination of the cupboard does not appear to be essential to any character left alive at the end of the play. Our hopeful expectation is that one day Hamm and Clov will be finished, leaving no legacy. The locked cupboard may contain the family heritage, which is why its contents has not been given to Clov, who is not a member of the family. There is no grandmother to remember when admiring the heirloom cups and saucers contained in the cupboard. Hamm’s parents have already been put in the ashbins and are dying. Hamm wants to cut all possibilities of continuity in the human race.
The cupboard is locked with a combination, not a key, which could be stolen from the blind Hamm. But using a combination lock for a cupboard is an oddity, which can hardly pass unobserved even in a play where every conversation is odd. There may be a small key to a cupboard, usually easy to pry open, and there may be a combination to a safe, in which the contents are very precious. Most of the audience would not have noticed any difference if Hamm and Clov had talked about the cupboard key, except perhaps for the fact that a combination cannot be obtained from a dead body. If the combination of a safe had been mentioned, the audience would be wondering about what kind of treasure had been hidden in it. Instead, we may have a safety mechanism protecting nothing of value. Clov could not kill Hamm because he could not obtain the combination, but the combination has lost its importance once Clov understands that he would be left alone, the last man on earth. The combination, as if it were the oral tradition, no longer needs to be passed on to the inexistent younger generation.
The cupboard will never be opened, and we will never know what was in it, as we will never know what was shown on the picture in the picture frame hung facing the wall. Our imagination will give us some pleasure with its findings, and our minds will rest better once we consider the artifacts as the individual notes in a complex piece of music: they are just notes, and that is all there is to them.