... but the clouds ...: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 21:20, 21 January 2008

Revision as of 11:28, 23 February 2008

Line 114:

: “The man would appear … to be immersed in guilt towards a missed opportunity, a dead love, a regretted course of action, as in ''[[Eh Joe]]'', but with a flatter style. [[Irony]] is subdued, [[stoicism]] more matter of fact, [[self-pity]] almost entirely absent, illusion excluded. The man is concerned with concentration, a [[Merlin]] conjuring up a ghost in his memory.”<ref>Calder, J., [http://www.english.fsu.edu/jobs/num02/Num2Calder.htm ‘Review: “The lively arts”: three plays by Samuel Beckett on BBC 2, 17 April 1977]’ in ''Journal of Beckett Studies'', No 2, Summer 1977 </ref>

Clearly the process in this play is open to interpretation. Is the process wholly internal, the man remembering someone real from his past or is he trying to conjure up some external manifestation of her, her ghost? And what is his motive for trying to evoke her? Is it simply to satisfy memory, to wallow in the moment awhile as Krapp does, or is she in some way his muse, an enabling force that makes the words come? Either way it is clear that he cannot control events directly, by the power of his [[Will (philosophy)|will]], things take place at best, as a bi-productbyproduct almost of his actions, but more likely they are entirely out of his control and all he can do is wait on them.

==References==