Endgame

Clov is the youngest of the four characters and the only one who is not related to the others by blood. Instead, he was adopted by Hamm after the death of his father. Hamm has turned the arrival of Clov’s father into one of his nostalgic reminiscences. The story of the bald, pale man who dragged himself to Hamm’s house in search of food has been told many times. Clov is forced to listen to the story of how his desperate, dying father managed to find a way for Clov to survive at the cost of subservience to Hamm. Clov has known no other life than that of being Hamm’s servant. Each day, his routine involves waking Hamm and Hamm’s parents and then fetching them food, toys, and medicine at their command. He has been trained to respond to Hamm’s whistle, and in this respect he comes to view himself almost as Hamm’s pet. When he hands Hamm the toy dog, Hamm says that “[the toy dog is] not a real dog, he can’t go” (35). Clov, himself unable to leave Hamm’s house, suddenly sees a reflection of himself in the toy dog. He cannot leave, so he begins to question whether he is real. He has grown up in an emotionally abusive household, and he has been told that this existence is preferable to the post-apocalyptic wasteland outside. He knows his father only as a figure in Hamm’s story. Hamm has assumed the role of his father, forcing him into a subservient role conditioned on their shared fear of being alone. Hamm tells the story of Clov’s father as a way to impress on Clov a fear of abandonment. As such, Clov cannot become real because he cannot endure loneliness or bring himself to abandon the man who raised him.

Despite the absurd circumstances in which he was raised, Clov is the most empathetic of the characters. He suffers from physical pain but endures this to provide food and supplies for the others. When there is a rat in the kitchen, he feels that euthanizing the creature would be the best option, rather than forcing it to share a house with the other characters. Hamm recognizes this empathy. At the end of the play, he credits Clov as possessing “a kind of great compassion” (45). Hamm may lack compassion himself, but when he is forced to be sincere, he can at least recognize compassion in others. This acknowledgement of Clov’s compassion is the closest Hamm comes to a compliment. It has an important effect on Clov, causing him to question his decision to leave. This form of compassion is the one good quality Clov has ever been said to have. If he were to leave Hamm, Nagg, and Nell behind, then he might betray his only positive attribute.

Clov’s indecision about leaving also illustrates his different relationship to the world outside. He is the only character who is able to look through the windows and glimpse the post-apocalyptic wasteland, even though he has never left Hamm’s house long enough to understand it for himself. The wasteland is a distant vista, another world from which he is separated both by the glass of the window and the lenses of the telescope. Clov is removed from the world and conditioned to live inside, forced to endure the others’ memories of their time before the apocalypse and their experiences of the outside world. To Clov, the outside represents a great unknown, which he experiences as dangerous and foreboding. There may be nothing out there, or there may be something which is hostile to him. Ultimately, he does not leave. He stays to listen to Hamm as he falls asleep, suggesting that Clov has decided against going outside. He returns to his cycle, he returns to his father figure, and he returns to his misery, choosing to become the compassionate person Hamm claims that he is, rather than finding some other version of himself out in the unknown of the wasteland.

Nagg is Hamm’s father. He and his wife Nell live in garbage cans at the rear of the stage. They both lost their legs in an accident many years ago and are confined to their current situation. Nagg is the more talkative of the pair. He emerges from his can with childlike demands, insisting on food which—according to Clov and Hamm—is quickly running out. He wants biscuits and sugarplums, for which he is willing to trade the one commodity he has available: his attention. In a way, Nagg functions as an ironic inversion of the actual audience. While the audience has likely paid money to listen to Hamm’s speeches about pain and misery, Nagg insists on being paid to function as his son’s audience. The relationship between the father and son is strained. Hamm blames Nagg for fathering him, referring to him as the “accursed progenitor” (9). Hamm lives a painful existence, and he lays the responsibility for this on Nagg, who had the indecency to bring a child into the terrible world. Hamm’s grudge against his father is predicated on the very nature of their relationship. At the same time, however, he is forced to depend on Nagg as the only one who will actually listen to his stories. Nell remains in her can while Clov can exit the room. Nagg is the only one willing to bargain with Hamm in this respect, so Hamm begrudgingly tolerates him.

Like Hamm, Nagg is a storyteller. He shares his son’s desire to nostalgically repeat memories from the past as though they are captivating tales. Unlike Hamm, he has nothing with which to bribe people to listen to his stories. Instead, he relies on his wife to be his audience. She listens, but she admits that the story becomes less enjoyable each time she hears it. He tells the story anyway, compelled by his own boredom and because he is beholden to the routine that is their lives. Nagg tells the story to Nell because doing so is all he has left. They return to their memories and their anecdotes, grasping at the fading emotional value of these rapidly diminishing slivers of nostalgia. When Nell dies, Nagg remains in his can. He weeps, one of the few genuinely emotional reactions in the play. He is not only weeping because he lost his wife, but because she was an essential treasurer of his emotional past. Without her, he cannot return to his past quite so easily. He has no one to listen to his stories and, without his audience (and without anything to purchase an audience of his own), he fears the chaos of uncertain, miserable existence.