Introduction to English Literature
2019-2020
1
KRAPP’S LAST TAPE (1958)
The Context:
Written for Northern Irish actor Patrick Magee, it was intended as a curtain-raising to
the play Endgame.
It’s considered one of Beckett’s major plays, together with Waiting for Godot and
Endgame.
The play is Beckett’s most autobiographical work: he had a revelation, in the same way
that 39-year-old Krapp does, and this epiphany about what his future writing must deal
with has to do with “darkness” rather than enlightenment and knowledge. This
moment of inspiration is narrated by Krapp, but not completely, as 69-year-old Krapp
fast-forwards the moment. Beckett described the discovery about what his writing
should be concerned with in this manner:
“I realised that my own way was in
impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in
adding". As Knowlson (Beckett’s main biographer) points out: “In future, his work
would focus on poverty, failure, exile and loss”. The playwright’s mother also dies
when he is 39 and the event of the blind going down while he is outside is
autobiographical. So are some of the girls described.
Beckett’s plays were grouped under the name of “Theatre of the Absurd”, a term
coined by Esslin, together with the plays by Harold Pinter, Eugene Ionesco and Jean
Genet, although he never acknowledged such tag. Nonetheless, Esslin’s definition
would apply to all Beckett’s plays:
The Theatre of the Absurd [...] tends toward a radical devaluation of language,
toward a poetry that is to emerge from the concrete and objectified images of the
stage itself. The element of language still plays an important part in his
conception, but what happens on the stage transcends, and often contradicts, the
words spoken by the characters
.
Link:
https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/nonsense-talk-theatre-of-the-
absurd
The Genre:
Although the play is generally considered as belonging to the “Theatre of the Absurd”,
if you look for a definition within a broader genre, it can be described as a
tragicomedy, though a postmodernist one:
