Abstract

Merriness and suffering seldom accompany each other. Looking at Samuel Beckett's dramas we find human beings whose suffering is both primordial—simultaneous with their conception—and final, allowing no culmination or relief. The sufferers have become indifferent toward their suffering because of a palpable lack of an alternative. They have grown accustomed to their misery, since their life was never anything but misery. Needless to say, in Beckett this ubiquitous misery and suffering never appear in themselves. The extremities of human calamities presented in various startling ways—Winnie's gradual sinking into the mound in Happy Days perhaps the most baffling—call for a legitimating dose of fitness, vitality, and...