Many people consider Beckett's plays to be existential in nature, which was an observation that Beckett himself strongly refuted. Whether or not the plays are almost entirely philosophical or whether they are merely staged representations of Beckett's own intellectual anxieties, they do have a thematic similarity between them, and this similarity mirrors the questions that Beckett found himself to be preoccupied with in his own life.
Troubled by the nature of time passing, Beckett's characters seem to be waiting for something. It is not clear whether they are waiting for life to start or death to come, but they are never able to enjoy simply living in the present moment, or to take the present for what it actually is. Beckett, like his characters, was uncertain of the meaning of life, and uncertain of what death would look like. Because he saw the present, and the passing of time, as the link between the two states of being, he was unable to simply be.
The meaning of life, and the nature of existence, was a huge preoccupation and concern for Beckett. He felt that human communication was the key to having a meaningful existence, but if meaningful communication was not achieved then how could a meaningful existence ever be? Beckett contended that emotion and memory were unable to exist independently of each other in any significant way; in order to remember things the way that they really were, we need to attach some kind of emotion to them. This is not the same as knowledge; We can have plenty of knowledge but without an attached emotion, knowledge becomes a list of facts with no actual meaning to them at all.
This is best demonstrated by the characters involved in the love triangle, who all speak at the same time. Consequently not only are they unable to understand what the others are saying, but the audience is also unable to understand or decipher anything clearly either. This demonstrates that although each is reciting the knowledge that they have, without the ability to engage in proper communication, they are simply making a collection of noises and sounds.
Beckett's dialogue is frequently reduced to noise or sound; dialogue as a spoken word sometimes becomes just another sound that has meaning only when it is interpreted correctly. This is one of the key tenets of Beckett's philosophy, and it is a constant in his plays and other writing as well.
