DISINTEGRATING IDENTITIES: A STUDY OF CHARACTER AUTOMATISM IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S ENDGAME

Abstract

This article discusses the fragmentation and the disintegration of the characters in the light of Zeno’s paradox of plurality. The characters indulge in automatism to overcome the sense of alienation and familial lack of compassion since their childhood. While automatism protects them against external contingency, it reduces existence to sequential divestment, with each beginning denoting merely the certainty of perpetually descending to the end. They fail to become a part of the whole where they fear that they may lose their subjective identities and submerge into the whole. It shows how the situation and the disintegration of the characters in Endgame symbolize the impossibility of becoming the part of the whole. This paper explores how Beckett goes even further than Zeno by showing the divisibility even of the part and tells how an individual is alienated from society, people around him and ultimately from himself and he lives only in temporal units without the possibility of finding intrinsic meanings of life.