Sacrifice, Inhibition, and Oedipal Fantasy in Krapp's Last Tape

Abstract

This article challenges an assumption that, implicitly and explicitly, has long structured the interpretive history of Krapp's Last Tape—namely, that Beckett's play presents the bitter consequences of a failed sacrifice. In order to make that assumption plausible, critics have had to posit a certain causal relationship between the scenes recounted on the tape made by Krapp at age thirty-nine. However, careful analysis suggests that this voluntaristic narrative of artistic ambition leading to sexual renunciation needs to be questioned. By attending to the pervasive Oedipal thematics of the play, this article contends that the apparent sacrifice (or “farewell to love”) by Krapp is actually better understood as the result of a more fundamental inhibition. Even though in Anti-Oedipus Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use Beckett's work (particularly the prose) to illustrate the purposeless productivity of the schizoid, much of the dramatic power of Krapp's Last Tape seems to result from the staging of precisely the sort of Oedipal scenario that is undone or exploded elsewhere in Beckett.