Krapp's Last Tape

Samuel Beckett, an Irish playwright, was one of the leading writers of the Theatre of the Absurd, a movement in drama that peaked in the 1950s. The Theatre of the Absurd explored existentialist themes, largely in response to the unprecedented devastation of World War II and the rapid modernization that followed. Its works often mix tragic elements with comedic clichés and feature characters in desperate situations. Krapp’s Last Tape does both.

Although it is ultimately a pessimistic play, the play begins with a bit of silly physical comedy. Krapp slips on a banana peelin an enactment of an old Vaudeville trope. This serves as an introduction to the play in several ways. First, the slapstick undermines the self-seriousness and pretension of the Krapp we will hear on the tape. As an old cliché, the inclusion of the peel also critiques the search for originality in art and drama and, more specifically, of Krapp’s search for these things via his own intellectual efforts. With its absurdity, Krapp’s slipping on the peel points to a meaninglessness that haunts his life and highlights the desperation he feels at the end of it. Finally, his near fall represents the pitfalls of the physical body, a strong theme throughout Krapp's Last Tape. The title of the play implies that the ultimate failure of his body, death, is imminent. (Beckett’s direction that the setting is in the future rather than the present confirms that the tape Krapp records is not merely his latest tape, but also his final one.)

The sense of frustration and futility that pervades Krapp’s Last Tape also marks it as a work of the Theatre of the Absurd. Krapp’s attempts at self-improvement have proved pointless. On the tape, he tells himself to stop eating bananas—“cut ‘em out!”—and reflects on his past resolutions to stop spending so much of his time on drinking (5). Thirty years later, he continues to be addicted to alcohol and to eat lots of bananas.

Likewise, his attempt to “separate the grain from the husks,” as he puts it, or to focus on “things worth having” in his old age, to the exclusion of all else, also fails (6). He chooses his work, cutting out love. As an old man, his career brings him no fulfillment, and he obsesses over his lost opportunities for love. Krapp does not really know in his youth which things are worth having, and he therefore cannot choose correctly. His failed resolutions and misguided attempts at culling meaning bring the concept of human free will into question and offer a pessimistic and deterministic answer.

Krapp’s vision on the jetty is another failed resolution. In that moment, Krapp endeavors to form an “unshatterable association” between “storm and night,” and “the light of the understanding and the fire” (9). His epiphany is that light and dark, which represent order and chaos, or intellect and emotion, are inseparable. The dark is essential to his search for truth. He continues, however, to separate the two, as his installation of the light over his table shows. When he reads the mention of the epiphany in the ledger, he has no memory of it, and he cannot stand to listen to it on the tape. His vision, ironically, might have saved him from the despair of his old age, had he succeeded at remembering it.

Krapp’s failure to assimilate the lesson of his own breakthrough indicates a shifting identity. What is all-important to Krapp in one moment is worthless in another. It also points to his faulty self-knowledge and to the pointlessness of his search for understanding: when he manages to get a glimpse of truth, he represses the memory. His intellectual striving is a Sisyphean task.

In Krapp’s ruthless rejection of love as a distraction from his work, Beckett comments on the toll of the search for efficiency in twentieth-century society. Krapp allows that his decision to isolate himself may well have led to a better ability to focus on his work: “maybe he was right,” he says of his past self (10). However, he remains filled with regret. Krapp’s despair points to the dehumanizing effects of the modern obsession with productivity. Freedom from chaotic human emotions may lead to higher output, but at the cost of loneliness and misery.