Samuel Beckett
and the
Other
Interpretations
 Krapp’s last tape
 Old Krapp has recorded forty-five birthday tapes, but listens
to a single one onstage.
 The nameless old man listens to three intercut memorystrands, conveyed in the theatre through three separated
loudspeakers.
 Krapp has basically concluded his life by preserving it on
tapes for a long time.
 And on his birthday, his sixty-nine, he remembers a point in
his life he once spoke of on a tape.
 Krapp’s last tape
 He is now of the opinion that since then, thirty years ago,
his life has not really developed, because he could not
resolve back then to stay together with a particular women.
(63)
 Indeed, he pushed this woman away from him and
determined his fate thirty years ago.
 It becomes apparent at the beginning that he knows
something important occurred back then.
 Krapp’s last tape
 He looks for a very particular point on the tape, the point
with the woman in the boat, her offer and his refusal, and in
the end surprises himself by coming to a strongly emotional
realization – suddenly and for the first time- that he cannot
bear any more. (60, 61, 63)
 It is through the tapes that Beckett conveys Krapp’s long
life and its repetitive quality – escaping love and enslaved
by habit.
 Krapp’s last tape
 Time
 The play marks time visually and verbally.
 Visually, we see Krapp’s large silver pocket-watch.
 Krapp looks three times at his watch, once at the play’s
opening, (55) once after mention of “a girl in a shabby
green coat,” (58) and the last time after the second playing
of the lyrical boat scene. (61)
 Krapp’s last tape
 What we know is that sixty-nine-year-old Krapp resembles
thirty-nine-year-old Krapp in his consciousness of time.
 Thirty-nine-year-old Krapp records that his mother died in
late Autumn and that his memorable equinox took place on a
March night. (57)
 Sixty-nine-year-old Krapp speaks of Summer outings, of
reading Effi Briest (a realist novel by Theodor Fontane –
1896), page a day. (62)
 Even in ordering himself to conjure memories, Krapp
locates them in time – gathering holly on Christmas Eve and
listening to Sundy morning church bells. (63)
Krapp’s last tape
 Not only is Krapp sensitive to clok and calendar time, but
he is also vulnerable to time’s duration.
Thought he marks each year ceremoniously, it is their
weight that he perceives at thirty-nine as at sixty-nine, through
the repetition of the word “moments”.
On tape he describes the simultaneity of his mother’s death
and a dog’s yelping: “Moments. Her moments, my moments.
(Pause.) The dog’s moments”. (60)
Moments brush by the boat scene too: “I asked her to look at
me and after a few moments – (pause) - after a few moments
she did”. (63)
Krapp’s last tape
 So the small unit of time enters two shattering experiences –
death and love’s end.
“Farewell to love” a last time, Krapp again listen to the
repeated “after a few moments.” (57)
Finally, all those moments add up to the years at the end of
the last tape.
“Perhaps my best years are gone … No, I wouldn’t want
them back”. (63)
Krapp’s last tape
 Manicheism in Krapp’s last tape
McMillan and Fehsenfeld have done a peculiar reading of
this performance.
They argue that throughout the play we attend to the
deployment of the Manichean doctrine (A major religion that
was founded by the Iranian Prophet Mani (c. 216–276 AD) in
the Sasanian Empire (224 to 651). Manichaeism taught an
elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between
a good spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of
darkness).
Krapp’s last tape
Krapp’s references to the three major turning points of his
apst, which he listen in the tape, are: his mother’s death, his
‘vision’ on the night of the ‘memorable aquinox’, and his
‘farewell to ,ove’ in the lake scene.
Beckett makes clear that these three moments are all
incidents from Krapp’s life in which light and dark, spirit and
sensuality, are mingled.
Krapp’s last tape
 They out line a progression of the three ‘moments’ central
to Manichean belief:
1) the past when spirit and matter were separate and matter
exclusively contained in a word of feminine darkness: ‘mother
at rest at last’, ‘the black ball’, ‘the dark nurse’.
2) The present when light and dark are mingled but the
process of redemptive separation is in progress, ‘memorable
equinox’.
3) the future when the separation of light and dark is
completed, ‘farewell to love’.
Krapp’s last tape
 In presenting the ‘memorable equinox’ and ‘boat scene’
Beckett also systematically interspersed the five Manichean
‘emblems’ of light: zephyr, wind, light quickening fire, clear
water with the emblems of dark: mist, heat, sirocco, darkness,
vapour.
The greatest incorporation of explicit Manichean emblems
comes in the boat scene as Krapp bids “farewell to love”.
It is a concentrated presentation of his breech of the three
seals:
Krapp’s last tape
 My ‘face’ (signaculum oris) in her breasts (signaculum
sinus) my hand one her (signaculum manus).
The Manichean elements culminate in Krapp’s new
recording as he interrupts his thoughts of the year just past to
recall once again the girl in the boat.
This passage, Krapp’s most enduring memory, had been
prepared for by including references to the eyes of the other
women from Krapp’s past. End
That Time
 It belongs to the same family of Not I, Rockaby, A Piece of
a Monlogue, Ohio Impromptu, Foot Falls, etc.
It is the theatereality that relates them.
Less fragmentary than the disembodied mouth of Not I, the
head of the old man might be a death mask glowing through
the dark.
Although the setting is again total blackness (hard to obtain
in most theatres), the old man has memories that ramble
through many places, while we see only his ancient human
head.
That Time
 Each of his three memory-streams flows around stone- a
hiding place for an imaginative child, a bench for lovers to
exchange vows, a support for an old man.
The child’s refuge is once again removed since it is sought
in vain by the aged man.
The love scenetakes place at the edge of a wheatfield and a
woods, or near a canal, or on a beach.
Finally, dissolves into a lonely setting by a window open to
a billowing shroud.
That Time
In old age a derelict seeks momentary she;ter from rain and
cold in a portrait gallery, a post office, a public library where
the dust speaks before if cinally settles.
Like trhe life scenes of Not I, those of That Time are
inchoate memories: they flow from the one image mouth –and
toward the other-head- in theatereality.
That Time
Three periods are intercalated in That Time, hovering
uncertainty in time and space.
An old man’s head bearly moves; his eyes open firefly when
words stop, but they close when we hear the susurrant verbal
stream.
The voice converges on the head from three directions in
time as well as space.
The firsts recalls a return visit to a childhood refuge, a stone
among nettle
That Time
The second depicts two lovers side by side in an outdoor
scene, not touching but exchanging vows.
The third paints an old Beckettian derelict sheltering himself
from wiknter in public buildings.
Three voices address the old man’s head as “you”.
They ask about time, and they designate ‘that time’
indefinitely.
That Time
The thirty-six paragraphs or verses divide intro three parts,
each part faltering to a halt during which the eyes of the head
open, the light brightens, and the breath pants heavily.
Scenes are etched incisively from three directions:
The search for a lost childhood paradise, the incredibility pf
a perhaps imagined love scene, and the sardonic backward
glance over efforts to make a life coherent.
The three voices speak in the same repetitive asyntactical
idiom, and through their different directions the words
accumulate into a long life lived.
That Time
That Time
That Time
That Time
 Rockaby
In Rockaby a woman, dressed in black and “Prematurely
old”, sits in a rocking chair alone on a dark stage.
Though her feet do not touch the floor, the chair rocks on its
own to the smoothing regular rhythm of tape-recorded lines
spoken in the woman’s vooce.
As the play opens she says “More”, and the rocking begins,
seemingly in response to her word.
 Rockaby
The recorder text, separated by the “Mores”, into four
sections, is repetitive, like a litany, and tells of a woman who
goes “to and fro”, looking “for another/another like herself
until, “in the end/the day came… when she said/to
herself/whom else/time she stopped”.
Her first “More” is breathy, forceful, and inflected as a
command, leaving an impression of a testy dotard making
demands on her child.
The second “More” is slightly impatient and feeble, she is
not at all sure that more will come, and in her doubtfulness she
blinks a few minutes.
 Rockaby
The third, inflected as a question, is much more airy than the
previous two, and though it is almost a whisper she thrusts it
out from her diaphragm mor forcefully that any other word in
both performances.
The fourth is still softer and articulated distinctly as a word,
but in a sad, almost tearful tone with a slight wobble of the
head.
On some repetition of “time she stopped” the woman speaks
along with the tape.
 Rockaby
“In the end” she rocked off seemingly towards death; she “was
her own other/own other living soul” – “other” asserting itself
in the theatre as a rhyme for “mother”.
We are given insufficient evidence to determine either who
the stage chacharter is or if she has really died.
The mention of “mother” rocking permits several different
responses: se may conflate mother and daughter, viewing the
woman as a composite characters who incarnates certain
tendencies passed down through all generations.
 Rockaby
We may continue to view her as a singular character whose
self-objectification has taken the form of identifying with her
mother.
We may even speculate that the voice belongs to the true
other, perhaps a daughter telling a story to “rock her [mother]
off”, or some other alter ego (perhaps language itself).
The phrase “Prematurely old” raises the question, without
answering it, of whether the woman is mother or daughter, and
so odes the character’s dress.
 Rockaby
The high necked evening gown looks like very old, like
something that belone to one’s grandmother, yet its sequins
and those on the extravagantly trimmed headdress, ever
prominent as they reflect the stage lights, suggest youth and
newness.
At the end there is no possible interpretation but only a
description and questions without answers.
 Footfalls
 In Footfalls we are presented with a woman, whose name
may be May or its anagram Amy, who paces back and forth on
a stage board.
He invisible mother speaks to her and about her.
Each woman asks questions about suffering and life from
which they may have graduated.
The daughter walks and broods.
The real mother and fictional mother intone the same
question: “Will you never have done… revolving it all?”
 Footfalls
Even after death the mind circles round and round on
suffering, and in a semblance of such circling, the feet walk
back and forth.
The four scenes of Footfalls are presented by successively
fainter chimes.
The first three scenes show the daughter May pacing back
and forth on a narrow strip of board, a different number of
steps and a different number of lengths in each scene.
In the fourth scene the board is lit for fifteen seconds; there
is “no trace of May”.
 Footfalls
Not only is May’s presence impermeable to normal time
conventions, they finally seem impertinent to her experience.
It is from pacing, from literal steps in time, that the first
three scenes grow, and yet they gradually depart form time.
The first scene is almost definite as to ages; the mother is
eighty-nine or ninety, and the daughter is in her forties.
Theirs is a logn relationship, and the mother suffers a long
illness.
The mother accepts each alleviation: “Yes, but it is too
soon”.
 Footfalls
Her own suffering must take its course, but she seeks a
terminus for the daughter’s suffering: “Will you never have
done… revolving it all… In your poor mind”.
In the second scene the invisible mother recalls the daughter
as a girl.
Pacing at home on the carpeting, the daughter May “one
night while still little more than a child” expressed her need
“to hear the feet, however faint they fall”.
In the third scene the daughter designates the divisions of
her course: “Sequel” and “semblance”, the one redolent of
time and the other of imitation.
 Footfalls
Sequel beings, “A little later, when she was quite forgotten”,
but immediately corrected to, “A little later, when as thought
she had never been, it never been, she began to walk”.
On the one hand, “she” is gone and forgotten, on the other,
she begins the walk that already usurped her girlhood.
No longer in the “old home”, she paces in a locked church
“during Vespers. Necessarily”.
Her words evoke evening and a time long past.
 Footfalls
To these is added a dying year as the daughter narrates a
dialogue between old Mrs Winter and her daughter on an
Autumn Sunday evening after vespers.
Together at the dinner table, the fictional mother and
daughter inhabit different worlds or times, for mthe daughter
says that she was absent from evening prayer, and yet Mrs.
Winter asserts that she haerd her “Amen”
This fictional daughter, Amy, resembles the perhaps actual
daughter, May, in tha thse is both in and out of the world, in
and out pf time.
 Footfalls
In Footfalls human time crumbles not to the dust but to the
lighted board on which human feet once fell, in theatre fact
and fiction.
The fourth scene lights the bare board briefly, before
darkness and silence obliterate all human traces.
Beckett’s two women –the mother invisible, the daughter
tattered and gray- give radiance to the darkness of eternity.
In this fuge mother-daughter dialogues Beckett dramatizes
the transience that has obsessed him for a very long time.
 Footfalls
In 1948 he stated:
Where to be lasts but an instant where every instant spills in
the void the ignorance of having been.
Time and space, those perpendicular coordinates, emerge
dependently but distinctly in Beckett’s dramas.
The way resonant memories or fictions are counterpointed
against immediate stage presence is vivid.
Physical specificity is invariant within each of Beckett’s –
literally “at this place”, but time can be static, liquid.
 Ohio Impromptu
Ohio Impromptu is about twenty minutes long and written in
the general style of Rockaby, Not I and Play.
That is, a meticulously sculpted tableau remains nearly
motionless the entire time, allowing spectators to meditate on
its metaphoric significance while a flow of words emanates
from the stage, guiding meditation.
Two identically dressed characters, Reader and Listener, sit
at a large table in exactly the same posture while one reads to
the other, and a wide-brimmed black hat “sits” at the talbe’s
center.
 Ohio Impromptu

 He speaks in a gruff, hoarse voice that occasionally drops
into low gutturality;
it sounds like a young like a young man imitting and old
man.
This Reader is unquestionably dissembling: he raises his
eyes from the book while he reads, glancing about the stage,
out at the audience.
We also have the impression that Reader has memorized the
book.
 Ohio Impromptu
Reader recites story of a man who moves aways from a
place where he was “so long alone together” with a companion
– probably a lover (“the dear name”), who may or may not
have died –to a “single room on the far bank” from whose
“single window he coild see the downstream extremity of the
Isle of Swans.”
Subsequently, the man is visited from time to time by a
stranger, who may or may not have been “sent” by the lover.
Each time he visits, the stranger spends the night reading a
“sad tale” to the man and then leaves at dawn.
 Ohio Impromptu
Are the characters onstage the characters in Reader’s story?
Are the to men wholly distinct or really different images of
the same character?
Why is there only one hat, and what does that hat’s presence
mean about the singularity or duality of the character(s)?
Is Reader the author of the “sad tale” and, if so, what else in
the play’s world does he control, and what is his relationship
to that other controlling author, Beckett?
 Ohio Impromptu
The knock-repeat-knock sequence, which recurs six times
in the play, is the only evidence, before the end, of contact or
exchange between the characters.
The first knocks are timed so that they fall just slightly
before Reader’s next word is expected, as if Listener wee
commenting on what has been said, or asking a question, or
acting a kind of literary athletic coach who is drilling Reader
in the practice of telling tales.
The question is why the knock must come and why the
phrase must be repeated is, so to speak, asked anew every time
Reader takes his barely audible breath.
 Ohio Impromptu

 The story reaches the point where the man in it reconsiders
his decision to move, and decides to stay where he is.
Instead of returning to “page forty”, as the book supposedly
instructs, and following the infinite cycle as in Play, he breaks
the pattern and brings his da capo to its fine.
At the end, we do not really know if the story is about
Reader, but it may be: “In his long black coat…” (286) and
“…a worn volume from the pocket of his long black coat…”
(287).
At the beginning didascalias we read: “log black coat”. END
 Not I
