Beckett's Endgame and Hughes's Crow: Myth and Meaning

Introduction: Literature After the Holocaust

In the years after the Second World War, the world was confronted by the reality that the human species was capable of committing horrors of seemingly insurmountable magnitude. Writers were faced with the difficulty of creating works of meaning in a world so cruel that any attempt to make moral sense of human behavior seemed futile. Existing genres of literature appeared incapable of encompassing the new reality of human existence.

To cope with this seemingly insurmountable task, the Irish dramatist Samuel Beckett in Endgame created a strange, empty kind of world at the end of time, where meaning and purpose in human activity are so absent that the ailing characters are incarcerated in waste receptacles rather than beds. The characters in Endgame are so mired, so stuck in their rote ways of being, that they have become nearly motionless. The most mobile character is a cripple; the others are trapped in waste bins, and are further physically incapacitated by blindness or pain. In what should be the most physical and mobile form of prose — drama — stasis reigns. The characters' stagnant inner lives are rendered into states of physical being on stage.

In contrast to Beckett's depicted graveyard of humanity, the British poet Ted Hughes' cycle of poems entitled Crow manufactures a new, harsh, primitive form of modern mythology to challenge previous Christian constructions of belief. Crow, unlike the protagonists of Beckett's Endgame — Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and Nell — is quick, voluble, and peripatetic in response to the cruelty of the world. Crow actively defies and wrestles with the creating deity he despises, who has manufactured a world where all living beings will eventually meet their demise, much to Crow's dissatisfaction. The stasis of Endgame, which defies even conventional theatrical norms by presenting an audience with neither a true beginning nor a clear ending to its narrative structure, is — like the cruel world that confronts the amoral Crow — a seeming parable about human existence in the wake of a world where movement for the sake of any higher purpose seems absent. This is a world that Crow responds to with anger and constant movement rather than stasis. Yet however harsh the views of both authors, each work still offers some hope, however transient: Beckett offers hope through the human connection that occasionally breaks through the characters' states of physical and emotional entrapment, while Hughes offers hope through the wild defiance embodied in the anti-heroic figure of Crow.

Works Cited

Hayman, David. "Endgame: Overview." The Reference Guide to English Literature. 2nd ed. Edited by D. L. Kirkpatrick. St. James Press, 1991.

Hoffman, Daniel. "The Art of Ted Hughes." The New York Times Book Review. April 18, 1971, pp. 35–36.

Sagar, Keith. Ted Hughes Poetry. 1975.