Indeed, Clov is little more than Hamm’s attendant-fetching Hamm food and adjusting his chair-and silent companion-listening to Hamm’s stories and unending complaints. Ironically, Clov is the only able-bodied character, yet he lets himself be bullied and ordered around by Hamm. Hamm has no regard for his parents he is only concerned with the character Clov. However, Hamm sits in the center of the room and is quite obsessed with being in the “center” of the other characters’ attention (Beckett 438). Their son Hamm is debilitated not by age, but blindness and an inability to walk.
The husband Nagg and his wife Nell have each been confined to an “ashbin” in a small, drab room. The older generation in Endgame is represented by the characters of Nagg and Nell. In his 1957 play Endgame, Beckett combines dramatic metaphor with elements of absurdism to convey how society devalues and dismisses the older generation. Irish playwright Samuel Beckett is perhaps the most famous dramatist of absurdism. Beckett, Mrozek, and Albee utilize metaphor in juxtaposition with absurdism to address the problem of society’s devaluation of the elderly within their plays. This paper will analyze how absurdist drama handles the issue of society’s mistreatment of the elderly. The American theater also has been influenced by the movement, largely due to Edward Albee’s plays that reveal stylistic and thematic undertones of absurdism. Playwrights Samuel Beckett and Slawomir Mrozek have helped propel the absurdist movement throughout Europe. The theater of the absurd provided playwrights a forum where they could express their concerns for society and use extreme and often offensive, absurdist mechanisms to challenge societal complacency and instigate change. Though absurdism would never be embraced with a fervor similar to that of Europe, the dramatic movement would establish its influence among other cultures.
The movement would evolve to embody a broader set of goals, particularly known for its social conscience, upheaval of traditional theater conventions, and treatment of controversial themes. Absurdism became a movement that, in part, represented the painful unrest and bitter cynicism of Europe during that era. Europe was experiencing a state of apocalyptic shock, horrified by the staggering death tolls and senselessness that were the legacies of such large-scale destruction. The absurdists’ core belief of an existence devoid of meaning was one that easily resonated among Europeans in the aftermath of the world wars (Frenz 170). Absurdism originated in Europe and quickly gained momentum. The theater of the absurd is based on the principle that either everything changes or nothing changes with the implication that life holds no meaning.
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