Embers by Samuel Beckett

First published: 1959, in Evergreen Review

First produced: 1959, BBC Third Programme, London

Type of plot: Absurdist

Time of work: The twentieth century

Locale: At the edge of the sea

Principal Characters:

• Henry, the play’s solipsistic protagonist
• His dead father
• Ada, Henry’s wife
• Addie, their daughter
• Bolton, and
• Holloway, characters in a story that Henry tells

The Play

Embers, a radio play, begins not with words but with sounds: the “sea scarcely audible,” followed by footsteps in the sand. Only then does the listener hear a human voice speaking a single word, “on,” followed by the sea again, followed by the voice—louder and more insistent this time, repeating the same word, as it will say, then repeat as a command, the words “stop” and “down.” Each time, Henry obediently yet reluctantly does what the voice (his own) first says, then commands him to do. Thus in a few brief strokes, the dramatic pattern for this brief play is established—an alternating rhythmical dialogue of sounds and words. Whenever the voice pauses, as it frequently does, the sea becomes audible once again. Within this macro-dialogue there exist a number of micro-dialogues involving Henry and the voices he hears, recollects, imagines, or projects. The first is with his father, drowned in the same sea before which Henry sits, the father who is now “back from the dead,” Henry says, “to be with me.” In dialogue with this silent ghost, whose body has never been recovered, Henry makes plain his ambivalence both toward the sea he fears, yet to which he finds himself drawn, and toward the father he once sought to escape but now conjures up from death to act as his sole audience and chief source of reproach for his wasted life.

Henry’s garrulous monologue includes (or metamorphoses into) his retelling a story he began some years before, while in Switzerland, where he had gone to escape the “cursed” sea but which he has never finished. “I never finished anything, everything always went on for ever.” The story concerns two old men. As it begins, Bolton, “an old man in great trouble,” awaits the arrival of Holloway, a doctor, “fine old chap, very big and strong.” Neither Henry nor Bolton ever explains why Holloway has been summoned or made to wait with Bolton in a room in which there are “only the embers, sound of dying, dying glow.” The mystery left unresolved and unexplained, Henry’s larger narrative suddenly shifts from Bolton and Holloway to Henry and his father (each aged pair comprising the one who summons and the one who is summoned). As soon becomes apparent, causality and explanations are far less important in this strange play than these parallel relationships.

Lingering just long enough to voice his father’s condemnation of Henry as a “washout,” Henry again suddenly shifts his narrative focus—this time from father and son to his wife, Ada, and daughter, Addie (the “horrid little creature” whom Henry holds responsible for turning Ada against him). Unlike the father, who serves as Henry’s mute audience, Ada converses with him. (Ada may even be present in what follows, though it seems more consistent with the rest of the play that she too is imagined.) Sitting together on the “brink” of the sea, which Henry imagines as “lips and claws,” Henry suggests that he and Ada depart, but she poses questions that imply the hopelessness of Henry’s situation: Where would they go, and what would Addie do if she found him gone (as he found his father)?

The scene again shifts, this time to Addie at her music lesson, being chastised by her teacher for making the same mistake over and over. Between this brief interlude and the even briefer one that follows (Addie at her riding lesson), Henry presents himself as his daughter’s ineffectual champion against Ada, the villainess who forces Addie to submit to the discipline of learning to play a piano and ride a horse. Against this image of a domineering wife, Henry posits the memory (which may be imagined rather than recollected) of Ada “twenty years earlier, imploring” Henry to do (or not do) something that is never made clear. The image of the imploring younger wife contrasts with the older one, who hectors Henry about his hemorrhoids, his underwear, and his habit of talking to himself.

Although Henry finds the sea’s sound intolerable, while Ada thinks it soothing, their differences may not be as great as they seem. Ada gives voice to Henry’s own doubts, posing the questions he would prefer not to face. When she suggests that Henry may be mentally imbalanced, he reacts “wildly,” picking up two stones, clashing them together, and saying “That’s life. . . . Not this . . . sucking!” He refers to the sucking of the sea, the slow diminishment of life that has brought him to this impasse. Henry’s “roaring prayers at God and his saints” is his way of silencing the sea—which can be heard only in the silences between Henry’s words. All that he had counted on—his love for Ada and hers for him, the birth of the child they waited so long to have, the stories he hoped to tell—has come to nothing.

Lear-like in his situation if not his stature, he cannot bring himself to accept Ada’s advice that “there is no sense in trying to drown it [the sea]. . . . It’s only on the surface, you know. Underneath all is as quiet as the grave. Not a sound. All day, all night, not a sound.” It is not silence Henry craves, nor is it merely relief from his loneliness. “I was trying to be with my father,” he tells Ada; “I mean I was trying to get him to be with me.” He desires recognition and, despite living in a post-Christian age, forgiveness for his sins and the resurrection of the dead. Although Henry asks for much, he appears to be willing to settle for considerably less—but not for nothing. Claiming to have forgotten whether Ada and his father ever met, he has her recount the meeting, and when she pauses he implores her to “keep it going, Ada, every syllable is a second gained.” Her story over, Henry rapidly scales down his desire: She need not speak, “just listen. Not even. Be with me.” By then, however, Ada is already gone, replaced by a series of quick pauses broken only by the same sound of hoofbeats heard earlier in the play.

Alone again, Henry attempts to retell the story Ada began. Failing, he simply switches back to retelling the Bolton-Holloway story, one which Henry now seems to be not so much remembering (as he implied earlier) as composing and revising as he goes. However, even as he moves ahead, he circles back to this description: “Fire out, bitter cold, white world, great trouble, not a sound.” In his story, Bolton’s silence—his refusal to explain why he has summoned Holloway or to answer any of his questions—continues to disturb Holloway. All Bolton does is implore Holloway first with a word, “please,” and then with the expression on his face. Henry too implores—“Ada!” “Father!” “Christ!” he cries out—but for what he, like Bolton, does not or cannot make clear. No one intercedes for them or, for that matter, for the puzzled helpless Holloway. The play ends as unfinished as Henry’s story, with Henry back where he started, prodding himself “on,” moving through the sand, then pausing, filling the silence by reading through his nearly empty appointments book: There is “nothing” that night but “tomorrow . . . plumber at nine. . . . Ah yes, the waste,” and then “Sunday . . . nothing all day. . . . All day all night nothing. . . . Not a sound”—except that of the sea, heard as Henry’s speech stops.

Dramatic Devices

In Embers Beckett combines two dramatic modes that he used separately and quite effectively in earlier plays: the monologue, as in Krapp’s Last Tape (pr., pb. 1958), and radio drama, as in All That Fall (pr., pb. 1957). The monologue is particularly well suited to Beckett’s needs, for it allows him to focus the audience’s attention on the character’s existential predicament, his aloneness in the world. However, insofar as this aloneness is less physical than mental or metaphysical—a matter not of place and social relationships but of the void both without and within—the staging of the dramatic monologue poses a significant obstacle to the realization of the existential predicament in that pure and extreme form in which Beckett has conceived it.

Beckett’s bleak vision of blind human persistence and progressive detachment and diminishment leads to radio drama (or, taken in a slightly different direction, to mime plays, such as Acte sans paroles [pr., pb. 1957; Act Without Words, 1958]). All That Fall, the first of Beckett’s radio plays, is for the most part a play performed on radio, having a rather full cast of eleven more or less “realistic” characters. Embers, Beckett’s second, exploits the form to far better advantage, for as Enoch Brater has noted, radio drama provides “an ideal medium for the transmission of the interior consciousness” that Beckett has made one of his most characteristic obsessions. For one thing, it enables Beckett to dramatize Carl Jung’s theory of the multiplicity of the unconscious self as well as Belgian philosopher Arnold Geulincx’s belief that one can hope to exert control only over one’s own mind, never over the external world.

Radio thus enables Beckett to focus on interior consciousness in such a way as to call into question the existence of any reality whatsoever lying outside the thoughts of the character, since those thoughts are relayed to the audience only through the character’s words. Radio drama also allows Beckett to extend the impersonal and antirealistic features of his art, to minimize plot, to limit setting, to narrow characterization, to dispense with psychological development, and to maximize his more theoretical and abstract concerns, particularly his interest in language as a performative rather than a communicative act. Radio drama permits Beckett to shift the audience’s attention from narrative to narration, from the sequence of actions to the act of narrating. In this way the play provides an oblique confirmation of the Beckettian view that all narratives exist autonomously rather than referentially and have less to do with discovering truth than with—as Beckett said of his earlier play Fin de partie (pr., pb. 1957; Endgame, 1958)—delaying the inevitable end.

Radio drama also provides Beckett with one of the most suitable vehicles for dramatizing humankind’s essential nature in the form of a disembodied voice speaking to the impossibly distant, perhaps wholly imagined, ear of some unknown but hoped-for other. Finally, radio drama manifests Beckett’s continued effort to create not only a denuded landscape but also a denuded art—stripped bare, whittled away in order to discover what, if anything, its essential nature may be. What works in theory does not necessarily work in practice, however; that is the view of one influential Beckett scholar, Hugh Kenner, who has questioned whether Beckett’s obsessive interest in illusion, solipsism, and voice does not, at least in Embers, interfere with intelligibility and cause the listener to feel “irritated” rather than “moved.”

Critical Context

The situating of Embers in the context of theater history, of twentieth century literature, and of Beckett’s oeuvre is a task made difficult by the apparent slightness of the work. It is, after all, a work of little length and even less mimetic substance, belonging to a form—radio drama—which has not attracted much critical attention, particularly in the United States. Critics—as well as audiences—have found Beckett’s earlier, longer, and slightly more conventional plays for stage, En attendant Godot (pb. 1952; Waiting for Godot, 1954) and Endgame, more appealing. Beckett himself has downplayed the importance of all of his dramatic works, this despite his having been placed in the front rank of absurdist playwrights and his having been awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature for a “body of work that, in new forms of fiction and the theatre, has transmuted the destitution of modern man into his exultation.”

Slight (short) and slighted though it may be, Embers is nevertheless both a representative work and an important, innovative one. It shows a typically Beckettian movement away from plot and character toward a divestiture of all that is merely theatrical and seemingly human—toward, that is, the distilled essence of both. This “disintegration of form and content,” as Raymond Federman calls it, was Beckett’s career-long obsession. “The artistic tendency is not expansive but a contraction,” Beckett wrote in 1935. “And art is the apotheosis of solitude.” This contractive movement inevitably leads, as in Embers, to the isolated character whose existence is not even seen but heard, or implied, perhaps merely imagined. This contraction in turn leads the character to whatever consolations memory can provide.

These consolations prove ambiguous, however, for memory is, as Beckett has defined it, “a clinical laboratory stocked with poison and remedy, stimulant and sedative.” Memory relieves the individual of the intolerable burden of existential isolation, but only at the price of making one even more aware of one’s predicament, which may be not merely psychological, as in All That Fall and Krapp’s Last Tape, but ontological and epistemological as well, as in Company (pr. 1983) and Rockaby (pr., pb. 1981). As Beckett’s plays and fictions oscillate between past and present, hope and despair, speech and silence, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish memory from imagination, recollection from solipsistic projection.

Sources for Further Study

Abbot, H. Porter. Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Astro, Alan. Understanding Samuel Beckett. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990.

Cohn, Ruby. Just Play: Beckett’s Theater. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Esslin, Martin. “Samuel Beckett and the Art of Broadcasting.” Encounter 45 (September, 1975): 38-46.

Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. 3d ed. London: Methuen, 2001.

Gussow, Mel. Conversations with and About Beckett. New York: Grove-Atlantic, 1996.

Homan, Sidney, ed. Beckett’s Theaters: Interpretations for Performance. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1984.

Kenner, Hugh. A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996.

Lyons, Charles R. Samuel Beckett. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983.

McCarthy, Patrick A., ed. Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986.

Worth, Katherine J. “Beckett and the Radio Medium.” In British Radio Drama, edited by John Drakakis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.