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Pitiful Human Condition Exposed in Endgame, Dumbwaiter, and The Horse Dealer's Daughter

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The Pitiful Human Condition Exposed in Endgame, Dumbwaiter, and The Horse Dealer's Daughter

The three stories, The Endgame (Beckett), The Dumbwaiter (Pinter), and The Horse Dealer's Daughter (Lawrence) all deal with the themes of repression, repetition, and breakdowns in communication. The stories show us the subjectivity of language and exemplify the complexities of the human condition.

Samuel Beckett arrived on earth in Ireland on Good Friday, April 13, 1906. He then spent the rest of his life wanting to be somewhere else. Beckett's life was one of silence, solitude, and depression. He felt he did not belong in this world and he was disenchanted with societal convention and the hum-drum existence that was …show more content…

The play premiered on April 3, 1957 at the Royal Court Theatre in London in French and was Beckett's second masterpiece.

Beckett's plays typically take place in one room - signifying a type of prison to its inhabitants. The characters endlessly repeat patterns of behavior such as repetitive questions, looking out windows, and telling the same stories. These repetitions are symbolic of the inane repetitions that human beings make every day - wake up, go to work, come home, go to sleep.

The absolute meaninglessness of this repetition is part of the human condition. The wait for death is unavoidable. The human being is born, lives, and then dies. Beckett's point is that there is no meaning to life, he calls it 'absurd'. Beckett participated in "The Theater of the Absurd", which was a French movement in the fifties' and wrote plays with this theme of 'nothingness'.

Influenced by Beckett and The Theater of the Absurd was Harold Pinter. Important to understanding Pinter's plays is understanding the nature of silence. Pinter "categorized speech as that which attempts to cover the nakedness of silence." In The Dumbwaiter, the dumb-waiter symbolizes a disconnection in human communication. The two characters, Gus and Ben, are hit-men awaiting orders on who is their next victim. Their orders are (presumably) finally sent down from the above floor via the dumb-waiter. The characters, like the

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