“We have kept our appointment, and that’s an end to that. We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?”
They have waited for Godot. And waited and waited and waited. And he never arrives. Bad form for a title character to be sure, but like everything Beckett writes, it is all metaphor. There is a bit of Camus to be found in this observation by one of the tramps who waits. Camus arrives at the conclusion that Sisyphus must be happy by finding a meaning to his endless punishment of rolling that ball up a hill only to watch it as it returns right back to its starting position. Boiled down to an essential quality of meaning way too simplistic to take as a full and rich interpretation, this quote signifies the fact that we must all fervently believe the point is in the journey, not in the arriving at the intended destination. Or something like that anyway. Great thing about Beckett: he is open to interpretation.
“At the same time I prefer this to . . . the other thing. Definitely. There are endurable moments.”
Play is a very strange play, even for Beckett. The three “characters” exist solely as literally talking heads clamped down to the most minimal of movement inside funeral urns. It is a visitation to the past, but it is never made clear if the characters are supposed to be dead; at least not at the same time. They can each speak and they each paint a portrait of a time in their past in which their lives converged, but they show no consciousness of the other’s “dead” existence. “The other thing” seems to refer to death which raises the level of ambiguity even further because, of course, it may also be a reference to living. It’s Beckett so the best one can arrive at is a very definite “who knows?”
“ . . . . out . . . into this world . . . this world . . . tiny little thing . . . before its time . . . in a godfor– . . . what? . . girl? . . yes . . . tiny little girl . . . into this . . . out into this . . . before her time . . .”
What is the point of including of this quote? Because it is representative of the entire play as a whole. The ellipses (…) are there in the play, written by Beckett with obvious intent, but in most productions entire monologue of which the play is composed is spoken with such rapidity as to be essentially unintelligible. But then, that is sort of the point. A story does finally wind up being told, sort of, but it is neither profound nor particularly dramatic. And that is also the point.
“Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank God that's all done with anyway.”
Krapp’s Last Tape is a two-man show featuring one actor. Which is to say that it is a play about an old man listening to a tape he made as a middle-aged man and commenting upon that person he was (and, by connection, the man he became.) The play features a monologue by Krapp as well as the voice of the young Krapp on the tape. Here is the central positioning of his existential crisis of a man nearing death listening to his own dreams which never came to pass as it turns out that his real interest is not the path which has led to his current state from that point in time thirty years earlier, but rather that road not traveled.
