Great Mercies.... I think.

       “Great mercies, great mercies.”

       And yet, mercy from what? This is the question we must ask ourselves after having read or watched Beckett's “Happy Days.” Winnie, unlike almost all other Beckett characters, focuses almost entirely on the positives of her situation. For most, being stuck waist-deep in a mound of sand with nothing around but a purse of random items and a crawling bald man would be considered more a curse than a blessing. But Winnie perseveres, convinced her life is a blessing compared to... compared to what?

        Examination of this point leads us to a place that Beckett often likes to go in his writing; a place he imposes on readers in nearly every work. Winnie is convinced of her “great mercies” because each of them represents a distraction from her ever having to face herself and the gravity of her situation. As long as the distractions last, she is free from the burden of her own life.

        She even finds a way to free herself from the added weight of her own thoughts. This, she accomplishes through the sluggish and stoically miserly Willie, to whom she directs her avalanche of babble throughout the play. Willie represents any human interaction for our protagonist, but Winnie abuses human interaction by using her own voice to drown out her thoughts. This is an idea that Beckett examines in Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. “I cannot go on. You must go on. I'll go on.” The speech cannot end, lest the thinking begin.  

Krapp, Beckett, Krapp.

         My first thoughts after reading Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape and watching John Hurt's stunning performance of the piece were not of Krapp, but rather of another Beckett character: Molloy. Molloy and Krapp were by no means “the exact same character” or any other silly universal Beckett argument. Instead, one appears to be a type of reflection of the other.

I was pleasantly surprised, then, to learn that Beckett had written Krapp's Last Tape as a response to hearing Molloy read by Patric Maggee; a segment of which we heard in class after reading Molloy ourselves.

         In this situation, the writer Beckett plays the elderly Krapp, listening to the foolish younger man–still Beckett–and reacting.

          Beckett and Krapp are much closer than any previous Beckett characters that we have read. Krapp is not wholly doomed in the same way that other characters have been. He has moments of happiness, however fleeting. (“Spooooooolllllllll.”) The same must be true for Beckett who, however damaged, cannot have been wholly lost to his bouts of depression.

          Somehow, with Krapp, Beckett finds a way to make us as readers even more suspicious about the possibility that the protagonist of the piece is actually Beckett himself struggling with the great and terrible questions of life.