Lab #2 Analytical Skills
BSc in Information Technology (K268/1)
Damien Gordon
Aidan Mc Carron
Student Number – D04105997
The passage of Krapp’s last tape opens up with Krapp in his Den sitting at the table. He’s
Wearing Trousers that are too short for him, a sleeveless waistcoat, grimy white shirt
open at the neck with no collar and a pair of size ten dirty white shoes.
Krapp is described as white faced, purple nosed, with disorderly grey hair, and he is
unshaven. He’s also described as very near sighted and hard of hearing, with a cracked
voice.
He begins the passage of the play rummaging through boxes of tapes, the tapes are his
spoken memoirs of bygone years, and he eventually finds the tape he wants and sets up
on the machine and then “assumes listening posture”.
On the first Tape is Krapp on his thirty-ninth Birthday, he celebrates quietly in the wine
house with a bottle of wine he’s wearing his old rags and he’s sitting beside the fire, He
jots down a few notes on the back of an envelope, he also consumes three bananas to aid
his bowel condition but it doesn’t seem to help. He enjoys the darkness he doesn’t feel as
alone in the darkness and he enjoys moving around in the darkness. In March of this year
he sees the “vision” at last of completing his best work his “opus magnum”. He try’s to
hear Old Mrs. Glome singing but she is not singing she doesn’t sing that evening. This
reminds him that he never sang as a boy and still doesn’t to that day.
He picks up another tape one that is “at least ten or twelve years old” that tape describes
the time he lived on and off with Bianca in kedar street, his relationship with Bianca
comes to an end during this time she takes it very while leaving Krapp to believe that she
never really loved him in the first place, Krapp spends a lot of time during this period of
his life drinking and womanizing his statistics states that he has spent “seventeen hundred
hours, out of the preceding eight thousand odd” in licensed premises, he vows to have “a
less engrossing sexual life”. It is also during this period of his life that his Mother passes
away after a long time as a widow meaning his father must have passed away a good few
years beforehand. His encounter with the dark nurse that tended to his mother ends badly
as she threatens to call the police on him, so he retreats outside to near his mothers
windows where he waits while she passes away, during this time he plays ball with a
small white dog.Krapp decides to keep the ball to remember his mother but then decides
to give the ball to the dog, After a year if “profound gloom” he also has a memorable
night that year involving having a sexual encounter with Effie on a water vessel. He
notices a scratch on her thigh and she tells him she got it from picking gooseberries.
Krapp Switches off the machine, Look at his watch stumbles into the darkness comes
back into the light a little uneasily, goes to the front of the table, fumbles around his
pocket for a key, opens the drawer and takes out a new reel, lays old reel on the
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dictionary and loads new reel, takes the envelope out of his pocket and lays it in front of
him, switches on reel and cleared his throat and starts talking.
Krapp is now sixty-nine, in his birthday recording he laments times past. He is now
drinking heavily and reminiscing by listening to his old recordings of a younger him. He
is now very lonely and isolated. He still believes he can become a famous author even do
his book only sold seventeen copies, eleven of them at trade price of his book Opus
Magnum. He also still regrets the rejection of the nurse, even do he is disappointed by
how his youth has turned out he would not like to re-live those years. He starts going
back to church like he did when he was a young lad in “short trousers” this might be a
sign that Krapp is now looking for forgiveness for the deeds done in his life.
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