Samuel Becket - Krapp's Last Tape (Critical literary analysis), Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Samuel Becket - Krapp's Last Tape (Critical literary analysis) e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Samuel Becket Krapp’s Last Tape In this ledger Krapp has taken notes as a gigantic archive of all his recorded reels of tape, these tapes are craps diaries recorded at every birthday year after year. Krapp therefore is an editor, his job has always been the one of editing his own writings and try to publish them in books to be sold autonomously to libraries and bookshops widespread all over the country to let him get known, but he was a failure. Krapp is the archetype and prototype of the modernist and post- modernist inept like the inept that was the famous protagonist of Italo Svevo’s novel “La coscienza di Zeno”. Zeno and Becket and also James Joyce were close friends and they influenced each other in their friendship, in fact Krapp’s Last Tape got the inspiration from Italo Svevo’s figure of the inept. The aim of Krapp who is an editor is the one of separating and cutting off useless parts of any artistic, intellectual creation, it is what the intellectual must do while creating his work of art, his work of artistic literary production, he must “separate the grain from the husks”, this is a biblical expression written in the book of Ezekiel, again in the Ecclesiastes like Thomas Stearns Elliot who referred to this famous psalm written by the prophet Ezekiel, the separation of the grain from the husks is God’s task, so the artist, the intellectual, the creator is similar to the maximum creator who in the universe corresponds to God the Father. God separates the grain from the husks and Christ told us that when he comes for the second time on Earth his task will be to separate the grain from the husks to promote the innocence, the well-thinkers, the good behaving, profitable, honest men and women of God and they will let to be ascended to Heaven where they will live forever in the glory of the creator, but those who have not repented and have chosen the road of the sinful life they will be thrown into the darkness of Hell where there will be tears and gnashing of teeth and this is the terrific promise to separate the grain from the husks that both God the Father and Christ his son gave mankind. So Krapp is an editor and paradoxically Becket makes a mockery of the intellectual, of the late post- Modernist age, while writing the editor must separate the grain from the husks, separating the grain from the husks he must cut off all the useless things of his text, the life is our gigantic novel that we write day after day and daily we live our story which is happening by making choices, we can choose because we have been gifted with the so called free arbitrium, if we choose for the best we are grateful to God and we are loved by God because we are following his message, if we choose for the road which brings up directly to the embrace of the demons, we choose to face our temptations, not to escape them, not to reject them and therefore we will not be saved, but we will be condemned to Hell for eternity. Krapp would like to separate the grain from the husks but in the end he realizes being an inept, a failing writer, the quintessence of the failure of the intellectual task in the Modernist age devoid of all the high values of the past that he has spent his life in senseless activities which have been fragmented the same idea which we re-found in Prufrock, Prufrock and Krapp are of the same nature, two fallimentary intellectuals who in the end of their lifetime realize how great their failure as intellectuals but also as normal creatures living their mortal experience has always been. Because the grain and the husks don’t exist, Krapp’s lifetime in the end is considered by him in this revisitations fulfilled, put into action at every birthday during which birthday he listens to thirty years old recordings, a recorded diary of how he spent his year till the birthday that he considers the awful occasion. The birthday therefore instead of being something happy and joyful to be celebrated with friends and family becomes a sad meditation of how vane his past year has been, his latest past ten years have been. He has a lot of resolutions, aspirations, ambitions but they all get waste, he is not able to take decisions that might be profitable and then he resolves in his resolutions to acknowledge that what he has done is vane and has got lost in a failure, in a downfall of all his hopes. So the grain represents symbolically, also in the biblical reference, the things worth having, the grain is worth because you can make the bread and the bread according to Christ metaphor is God’s nutriment offered in rescue for mankind’s sins, so who eats the bread of life will be given eternal life, but who embraces the husks, SAMUEL BECKET 1 the materialism of the twentieth century which perishes very soon when we die and we lose our mortal coil, as Shakespeare called it in Hamlet, we are stupid and crazy because we embrace what perishes and we forget and let flow and let slip off our hands what being spiritually does never fail and remains forever in our spiritual afterlife. Krapp is very ill and rather old, sixty-nine years old but his health is very poor, he is going to die. This is one of the most moving scenes of Krapp’s last tape and it is the episode, the sequence of this past tape in which he listens to the episode in which his mother was dying and he was much younger, he was thirty-nine years old, thirty years before this moment of his final stage in his part of his life, he listens again to this diary and re-experiences the feelings, the emotions that he had felt when being a young boy was witnessing with his eyes the death of his mother, he was outside not to be involved in the act of renunciation, Krapp renounces because he is an editor and his task is to separate everything and take the good from life getting rid of the bad. So despite being very sad about the death of his mother he looks forward to cutting the relationship with her who is dying as soon as possible, not to prolong the moment in which he is suffering, cutting away, let things go away, renouncing to them: the renunciation is an instrument of maturity, of acquired maturity, when you get rid of your past, you pass to new experiences and you become more mature and therefore Krapp practices his task on editing, of cutting off the useless stages of his lifetime, it is very symbolical the fact that the blind gets down, the blind falling down is something which connects Krapp with the idea of separation and of renunciation, the blind becomes a barrier that separates the continuation of his lifetime on Earth from the end of the lifetime of his mother, her mother dies and the blind is closed like the that are closed in the blindness. So also this introduces the typical recurrent theme and motif of Becket’s dramas, the impossibility to perceive and to be perceived, the inability of perception in a world that changes so rapidly that no absolute value exist anymore and nothing can be perceived, so that men and women and above all artists who live in the twentieth century and experience its fragmentation and evanescence and also the futility of culture, of values, of ideals in the twentieth century are blind in the inhabitants of a blind landscape, they cannot see anything because everything cannot be understood, cannot be seen, cannot be looked at, everything changes and therefore we are strangers to ourselves, also in Albert Camus “L’Étranger” there is the scene of the death of the protagonist’s mother but the protagonist’s mother, like Krapp, seems not to wish to be involved in his mother’s death because he goes to the cinema to watch a movie whilst is mother is dying in her dying bed, she is dying and he, his son, escapes from the serious sadness of being witness of the death of his mother, he practices a voluntary separation from the death of his mother getting blind at her sufferings and trying to enjoy his life. Here the enjoyment is represented in Krapp by the white dog, the white dog who wants to play with a small black bole that Krapp happens to find in his hands, he does not explain why, the connotation of this black bole resembles very similar to a symbol which contains a hyperbolic generalization and extension to the whole Earth. In the moment of maximum grief and pain due to the death of his mother Krapp practices a voluntary separation from her and therefore he gives the black ball represented our senseless Earth planet, a small, old, black, hard, solid rubber ball to his white dog, the black and the white are metaphors of the grain and the husks, the husks, the rubbish is black, is dirty, is useless and must be thrown away, the grain is white, is light- yellow and it brings the light of the worth, of the value but it is very hard to find grain, that’s to say to find the whiteness in a dark world that is after all full of rubbish and therefore also the human kind becomes rubbish in the twentieth century, we are made of rubbish in the vane search for some grain in ourselves, in our lifetime that in the end we are never able to recover from all the waste that we realize we are made of. All Krapp’s Last Tape is plaid on this contrast between the lightness of grain and the darkness of the husks. Quindi secondo Krapp chi ha perso Dio, chi rinnega Cristo vive immerso nella sua stessa spazzatura e quindi non ha nessun valore da mostrare a sé stesso in questo cammino terreno e Becket era agnostico. Krapp curses against himself when he was thirty years younger because at that time he was full of pompous SAMUEL BECKET 2