Neither To Be Nor Not To Be: The Dialectics of Un-death in Hamlet and Endgame

I love the old questions. Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them. (Beckett 110).

A question famously posed by the prince of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “to be or not to be”,  becomes the existential specter that haunts Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. The latter play depicts the state of that question unresolved, neither being nor un-being, but rather in an un-dead limbo. When Prince Hamlet asks his question, he presents it as a binary choice: either being or not being, with no compromise between the two options, no going back and forth. However, the ghostly return of his father, King Hamlet, erases the boundary between life and death. Rather than being set apart in binary opposition, the two have become dialectically engaged, lurching towards an undead synthesis. The undead state of King Hamlet is literal: he’s a ghost come back from the dead, and the  character is staged with lights and sound effects and costuming that indicate his spectral nature. Undeath in Endgame acts on a more metaphorical level. Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and Nell are all technically ‘alive’, but they are ontologically disjointed, suspended in a state that isn’t quite life, but not quite death. The reaching of a synthesis between the two is the beginning of yet another equation in which “[t]he end is in the beginning”.(Beckett 126). Like Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, Endgame examines a never-ending series of death and rebirth, but instead of tracing a cyclical pattern as in Godot, the characters of Endgame experience death and rebirth dialectically, as a repeated series of compromises between life and death, getting farther and farther away from being but never able to reach non-being, becoming more more distorted every time, losing limbs and sight. Both Hamlet and Endgame explore a dialectic of un-death, a specter that manifests itself as a literal ghost, as well as metaphorically as the fear of re/birth, generational conflict, and the unrequited desire for death.

This spectral dialectics between life and death in Hamlet and Endgame, where the “the spirit comes by coming back [revenant], it figures both a dead man who comes back and a ghost whose expected return repeats itself, again and again” (Derrida 10), are a demonstration of Jaques Derrida’s concept of hauntology, a portmanteau of haunt and ontology. Hauntology is the articulation of a state that is  “neither living nor dead, present nor absent: it spectralizes. It does not belong to ontology, to the discourse on the Being of beings, or to the essence of life or death”(Derrida 63). It is the ontology of a ghostly state between life and death, neither to be nor not to be. The concept is introduced in Derrida’s Specters of Marx, and while the book discusses the future for Marxist thought in the neoliberal “end of history”, it’s perspective is deeply informed by Hamlet. Hamlet gave birth to hauntology, so to do a hauntological reading of Hamlet would be redundant. Hauntology instead presents a way to view Endgame through the lens of Hamlet, a way to explore which of Hamlet’s ghosts still haunt the end of history. The ghost of King Hamlet is the most obvious, the most literal, manifestation of the undead in either play. While some interpretations refigure the ghost as psychological projection of Prince Hamlet, someone who already tended towards grandiose melancholy and suffering from the death of his father and the political turmoil of a crumbling state, this seems mostly done to reduce ineffable specters to easily-classified pathologies. The ghost is loaded with symbolism, but it can’t be reduced simply to what it signifies. It’s both a metaphor and something that exists in the world of the play. The ghost is real. King Hamlet was murdered by Claudius, his brother and Prince Hamlet’s uncle, and then returned as a ghost. There are a number of onstage death scenes in Hamlet, but King Hamlet’s death occurs before the start of the play: he enters as a ghost, already undead.

While Hamlet is filled with onstage deaths, Endgame is haunted by the horrifying specter of birth. The possibility of birth seems just as terrifying as the possibility of death, if not more so; in fact, Hamm seems to long for death while recoiling in horror at the possibility of birth. He and Clov fear the potential that the world will continue on through rebirth of subsequent generations. Clov is “dismayed” upon spotting a small boy out of the window, warning that he may be a “potential procreator”.(Beckett 131). Hamm reassures Clov and himself that the boy is trapped in the same limbo they are, unwilling to imagine a the possibility of another world, saying “[i]f he exists he’ll die there or he’ll come here. And if he doesn’t…”.(Beckett 131). The statement, like the state of the boy, is left unresolved. Hamm imagines that the only way the boy can live is with him, that nothing can exist outside of him. His argument is logically sound, even if there’s no indication that it corresponds to the world outside itself, whether it really is true that the boy will die if he doesn’t come to join Hamm and Clov. Hamm’s solipsism is so strong that it reveals the solipsism of logic itself, whose validity bears no relation to its truth to the world outside of itself. Hamm’s distaste for life outside of himself extends to the smallest articulations of being. Even the discovery of a flea is a cause for terror to Hamm, who is so committed to his vision of annihilation that he’s at first skeptical there any fleas left in the world. When the flea bites at Clov, asserting its existence, Hamm descends into an existential spiral about that tiny, irritating, speck of life, fearing that “humanity might start from there all over again.” (Beckett 108). He is so existentially exhausted that his own death would not be enough for him; existence itself has to cease. He resents the suggestion that things will be reborn, seething “[…violently.] But what in God’s name do you imagine? That the earth will awake in spring. That the rivers and seas will run with fish again? That there’s manna in heaven for imbeciles like you?”.(Beckett 118). The possibility of the world being reborn fills him with anger and he callously dismisses the possibility of heaven. Seized by a virulent and nihilistic solipsism, Hamm cannot imagine his own death without the world dying as well.

Another way the anxiety over rebirth manifests itself in Endgame and Hamlet is through the relationship between generations, which in these plays operate under a spectral dialectic as well. The two plays offer opposing relationships between (adult) children and their parents. King Hamlet maintains control over Prince Hamlet even in death. The father’s ghostly return consumes the psyche of the son, driving him mad. Death doesn’t interrupt the king’s power over his kingdom, and through his son he dictates the the affairs of Denmark, righting the wrong that “the whole ear of Denmark/ Is by a forged process of my death/ Rankly abus’d”(I.V773-775) by organizing the death of his brother to “revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.”(Shakespeare I.V.761). In contrast to King Hamlet, who is dead but still wields great power, Hamm’s parents, Nagg and Nell, are alive but already symbolically buried. They are stuck in in trash cans, dependent on their son to let them out. The older generation is discarded by the younger generation, who exerts seemingly total control over them. In this way history is discarded. The generational complexity also calls to mind Oedipus Rex,  the play about the king who unwittingly fulfills the prophecy that he would kill his father and sleep with his mother, then blinds himself in shame. This is another place where some critics have had a tendency to turn towards psychological analysis, leaning on the pathological Oedipus complex as developed by Freud. However, Hamlet is so influential on the theory that to analyze Hamlet through the lens of the Oedipus complex would be nearly redundant as redundant as analyzing Oedipus Rex through the lens of the complex that is named after it. Much like hauntology was born out of Derrida’s engagement with Hamlet, the play is seminal to Freud’s theory. In “On Repression In Hamlet”, included in Interpretation Of Dreams, Freud explicitly connects the two tragedies, saying “another of the great poetic tragedies, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is rooted in the same soil as Oedipus Rex. But the whole difference in the psychic life of the two widely separated periods of civilization, and the progress, during the course of time, of repression in the emotional life of humanity, is manifested in the differing treatment of the same material.” (Freud). If Oedipus represents a man of the ancient world and Hamlet the modern, and Oedipus fulfills the prophecy that Hamlet represses, then Hamm represents a man at the end of history who is able to neither fulfill nor repress his desire. He enters the play blind; the prophecy has already been fulfilled. Hamm’s blindness takes from him the ability to blind himself. Clov has never even seen Hamm’s eyes, but Hamm assures him that they are now nothing but whiteness, much as the world outside has been reduced seemingly to nothingness. At the end of history Hamm can neither fulfill the prophecy nor reject it; he’s suspended in a limbo between them, disfigured and waiting for a death that won’t seem to come. 

Both Hamlet and Endgame explore the distorted space between life and death with a dialectic of undeath, ontologically disjointed. The hatred of birth in Endgame stems from  is the unrequited desire for non-existence. Hamm and Clov’s lust for annihilation extends past existential angst into suicidal nihilism. Clov describes his desire, saying “it’s my dream. A world where all would be silent and still and each thing is in it’s last place, under the last dust.”(Beckett 120). Alienated from life, Hamm and Clov long for an equally unattainable death, stranded between the two, in limbo, unable to resolve Hamlet’s question.

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Derrida, Jacques, and Peggy Kamuf. Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Routledge, 2011.

Freud, Sigmund. Interpretation of Dreams. “On Repression In Hamlet”.1911