Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and the Economy of Ressentiment

This chapter examines the various strategies deployed by Beckett’s characters in his drama Endgame (1957) to bear their suffering in a world dominated by physical pain, ageing and decay, and by feelings of frustrated powerlessness, or ressentiment. Reading the characters’ reactive, defensive postures as bound to their experience of chronic pain and physical deterioration, this chapter observes their incapacity to constitute themselves as efficacious agents through narrative means. It then focuses on their repudiation of, and yet continued dependence upon, Christian theodicy, their recourse to retributive cruelty, and their invocation of a witnessing audience as alternative means to render their suffering existence tolerable.