ABSTRACT
Godot foregrounds both the immediacy of corporeal and intercorporeal experience—hunger, pain, laughter (which hurts), embraces, kicks, beatings—and the incorporeal evocation of generations of historical trauma: 'all the dead voices'. Godot and Endgame further interrogates how and what one sees and notes the 'consequences of not seeing'. Endgame stages the decline of a world, from the deterioration of the individual body to the decimation of creation itself. As in Godot , the accumulated corpses of history haunt the stage and challenge the parameters of habitual perception. The verbal and scenic patterns and repetitions in Godot and Endgame emphasize the interdependence of the sets of character-players, whereas the focus on corporeal needs emphasizes their vulnerability to others who may or may not respond to those needs. Beckett's next two stage plays, Krapp's Last Tape and Happy Days , explore the experience of embodiment in more intimate detail through focusing on a single or principal protagonist, and through juxtaposing monologue and performance.
