ABSTRACT
Krapp's Last Tape and Happy Days continue Beckett's theatrical presentation of aging bodies whose perception and mobility are failing. Indeed, through their focus on the experience of the flesh and their manipulation of the spectator's visual field, Krapp's Last Tape and Happy Days challenge the myth of objective vision, founded in a de-corporealized eye. Krapp's modes of embodiment are fractured between past and present, self and other, body and voice, masculine and feminine, and flesh and machine. In turn, the performance requires shifting modes of perception on the part of the audience, between seeing and listening, the visible and the invisible. In Beckett's later drama, the body of flesh, foregrounded in Krapp's failing eyesight and limited mobility, and in Winnie's exposed arms and bosom in act one of Happy Days, will become a shadow of itself, emerging only in memory or offstage.
