“Is it not time for my pain-killer?”: Endgame and the Paradoxes of a Meaningless Existence

Résumé

This article analyzes the nonsense and violence embedded in the very “logicality” of language in Endgame, and how this aesthetic mechanism
creates an entropic universe in the play. It also focuses on Beckett’s insistence on the vagueness of temporality, on habit and on human memory as products of constant repetition which transfigure the reified empirical world of History into the aesthetic realm of this play, whose central axis revolves around an absurdly repetitive stasis. This repetitive stasis triggers the characters’ gloominess in face of their impotence to break free from their farcical and cyclical repetition of beginnings and endings.