The Absurdity In Samuel Beckett's Plays

The two world wars completely destroyed people's religious faith, rationality and all the lofty ideas and values. The rapidly developed material wealth also put them in an alienated, oppressed, and solitary state. People think man in the age has been left in a purposeless world. He is cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots; all his actions become senseless, absurd, and useless. The Theatre of the Absurd is an expression of the state of mind to which this situation gives rise. It presents absurdity not only in content, but also in form. The absurd writers ignore or distort conventions of structure, plot, and characterization and exemplify the failure of language in their dialogues. Beckett is one of the most representative of the group of absurd writers. He has practiced the absurd themes in his plays; his mission can be seen as the attempt to awaken man to the grim facts about his life. Though the problem of absurd is probably more acute now than ever before, it is not a problem new to our century. Men of letters have been striving to find a systematic, rational explanation of reality for centuries. However, all the efforts turned out to be Pyrrhic, ended up in a vision of absurdity and contributed to the uprooting of the 20th century man.This paper will focus on the absurdity in Samuel Beckett's plays.The introduction gives a brief description of the background of the giving rise of the Theatre of the Absurd and the characteristics of the Absurdists.Chapter one is about Beckett's life story and the main influences on his playwriting which including his literary antecedents and existentialism. Beckett is alive to the qualities of writers of the past and those of his contemporaries whose focus is the same aspect of existence. Beckett is working within the tradition of Dante, Swift, Sterne, Celine and James Joyce. A group of existentialists also contributed to Beckett's thinking and writing. However, Beckett, the Absurdist, hasn't copied the works of the existentialist, instead he has developed it. And at last, this chapter gives an overview of Beckett's playsChapter two gives a full display to the absurd themes in Beckett's plays. First is the theme of time and waiting. The ceaseless activity of time is self-defeating, purposeless, and therefore null and void. The act of waiting is an essential and characteristic aspect of the human condition. Passing time is the chief occupation of Beckett's characters. Waiting is to experience the action of time, which is in constant change. And yet, as nothing real ever happens, that change is in itself an illusion. The second is about loneliness and need for companion. Almost all the characters in Beckett's plays are constantly lonely. Consciously and unconsciously they depend on their companions to identify themselves, otherwise they will be lost. The third is about death and suicide. Beckett's characters are a set of people wandering around the gate of death. They desire to die but can not do it. The fourth is about search for self. Human personality is elusive. Beckett has found a graphic expression for the problem of the ever-changing identity of the self in his plays. The last is about void and end of everything. Void is the usual atmosphere of Beckett's plays. Almost all his plays deal with the last thing - the end of a man, a woman, a social order, or the whole world.Chapter three is about his absurd and unique writing techniques. He has practiced cyclical, repetitive beginnings and endings in several of his plays, and creates symmetrical characters. Several of Beckett's dramatic designs elucidate a notion of a circular existence. The characters strive for a certain end from the beginning of a play and would end up in the same position when the curtain falls. What they have done is repetition and what they have achieved is nothing. He also tries to find means of expression beyond language. Language in his plays serves to express the breakdown, the disintegration of language.Chapter four is about his absurd visual images. Beckett has employed a lot of visual images, for example, the memory, road and room. Visual images, what actually appears in dreams and memories, are demonstrated on the stage, and they are important constituents of Beckett's plays. He intendes to find the metaphors that will paralyze habit and expose his readers and audience to reality. His images are used to shock, insult, mystify, and will work upon us in such a way that the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being.Chapter five deals with the absurd stage property. Beckett takes advantage of the stage and the properties to illustrate his ideas. Most of the props in Beckett's plays are simple, everyday objects in natural realistic surroundings. With few exceptions, they are things people wear, carry or have around the house; the context of the play transforms them into significant objects. Things don't have a life of their own, but they become very lively "spokesmen" to characters who cannot or will not use words.Beckett's works are attempts to capture the totality of an emotion in its most concentrated form. They communicated to us the experience of the single moment in the fullness of its emotional intensity, its external totality. His entire work can be seen as a search for the reality that lies behind mere reasoning in conceptual terms. And that is what art is trying to capture. That is the aim and objective of Samuel Beckett's art.