A Heidegger's Interpretation Of Beckett's Major Plays

Samuel Beckett, as the leading representative of Theatre of the Absurd, pushes the new school of drama to its peak. His plays have influenced several generations of contemporary playwrights throughout the world. With the disguise of grotesque characters and absurd plots, these plays arouse the global theatre-goers' resonance by their underlying existential themes. They reveal the author's profound and penetrating meditation on the living condition of the whole human beings, and truly mirror the modern people's painful and perplexed struggling for true selves but with the final goal in far distance.Based on Heidegger's existential philosophy, the thesis tries to systematically analyze the existential themes in Beckett's three major plays Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days from the aspects of the meaning of existence, the time and Being and the relations between individual beings. Firstly, the thesis argues that all the characters in the plays are aware of their Being by experiencing the total nothingness. According to Heidegger's three phases of existence, the characters with no definite social identity have surpassed the first phase, but are sandwiched between the second phase of inauthenticity and the final phase of authenticity. Secondly, time as the permanent existential theme is discussed here. The nature of time is abstracted from the function of measurement. The wholeness of past, present and future leads to the obscure sense of time in the plays. Time is independent from beings and can function as the obstacle preventing the characters from achieving their authenticity. Furthermore, the thesis also reveals the main cause of imperfection of the existence—the deficiency of understanding and the solicitude between the individual beings. The pairs of characters indicate the impossibility of absolute solitude. As Heidegger argues, the attunement of individual beings is the only path to authenticity. Beckett exaggerates the deficiency of solicitude by disabling the language to extreme nonsense to let the audience be conscious of their greatest obstacles to authenticity.From these analyses, it can be clearly seen that by means of his major plays Beckett intends to warn people nowadays the necessity of awareness of the meaning of their existence and their authentic selves, and meanwhile, as a playwright, he also takes over the responsibility to point out the way leading to authenticity.