ABSTRACT
In 1969 Endgame was the subject of a volume in the twentieth century views series: the editor, Bell Chevigny, drew together commentaries from Martin Esslin, Ruby Cohn and Hugh Kenner (commentaries that had already appeared in the Theatre of the Absurd, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut and Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study) and essays from Richard Goldman (on Endgame as an entropic drama, running down to nothingness), Anthony Easthope (who argued that Endgame was a dialectic between the 'pursuit of meaning and the indifference to meaning' (p 70) and Ross Chambers (who analysed the play as a performance text). The collection also included a translation of Towards an Understanding of Endgame7 by the German philosopher and critic Theodor Adorno [36, 38, 76-8]. Adorno rooted the play firmly in its historical context
After the Second World War, everything, including a resurrected culture, was destroyed, although without its knowledge. In the wake of events which even the survivors cannot survive, mankind vegetates, crawling forward on a pile of rubble, denied even the awareness of its own ruin.
