“Something is taking its course”:Endgame’s Frustrated Musicality and the Evolution of Beckett’s Late Dramatic Style

Abstract

Scholarship of Samuel Beckett’s drama often calls attention to the playwright’s engagement with sound and musicality. Building on this scholarship, this article takes a musically informed sound studies approach to Endgame, examining the acoustic effects of the play’s musical elements. Such an approach both reveals that musicality lies at the heart of Beckett’s famous scepticism of discursive language and challenges existing conceptions of the evolution of Beckett’s dramatic style. Drawing connections between Endgame and Play, the work widely considered to have initiated Beckett’s late style, the article argues that the type of linguistic denaturing associated with that late style is traceable to Endgame’s particular brand of musicality – a musicality “frustrated” by language’s ultimate inability to become instrumental music.