End Game from the Views of Dollimore - Book Report/Review Example

One of the prominent literary analysts, Jonathan Dollimore has explained the term 'radical' as anti-establishment in his most original and influential critical work Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries and he claims to have identified the real challenge of art in the concept of 'radical'. In fact, the concept is a ferocious but effective attack on the idea of essentialism in literary studies. "Anti-humanism, like materialist criticism more generally, challenges the idea that 'man' possesses some given, unalterable essence which is what makes 'him' human, which is the source and essential determinant of 'his' culture and its priority over conditions of existence Those forms of individualism premised on essentialism tend, obviously, to distinguish the individual from society and give absolute priority to the former.

" (Dollimore, 250) Therefore, Dollimore, through the concept of 'radical', challenges the concepts of essentialism and 'radical' means anti-establishment to him. Thus, the opening scene in the play by Beckett illustrates some essential disconnected ideas. "Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. / Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. / I can't be punished anymore. / I'll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me.

/ Nice dimensions, nice proportions, I'll lean on the table, and look at the wall, and wait for him to whistle me." (Beckett) Here, the author establishes a kind of discordance between the actions and words of Clov who represents the radical tendencies of human beings. Beckett gives a notion of existentialist understanding of human beings and this existentialist view of human beings challenges the idea of essentialism and materialism. "To structure the world and define man in terms of determining absence involves a teleological inversion characteristics of an influential version of existentialism Existentialism in this guise also becomes especially susceptible to a materialistic critic" (Dollimore, 262) In short, Samuel Beckett in his End Game provides a radical view of human nature and this existentialist understanding of man illustrates that the use of Dollimore's idea of 'decoherence' is most important in constructing a 'radical' reading of the play.

In his play Bus Stop, William Inge makes use of the elements of Dollimore's concept of 'decoherence' in order to present the human condition through the story of the four passengers and the bus driver who is stranded at Grace's Diner by a snowstorm. At the end of the play, the author has a great lesson for every character. In short, these celebrated playwrights of the modern literature make use of Dollimore’s idea of ‘incoherence’ to establish that individuals are discordant beings who are inferior to society, and to challenge the essentialist and radical views of ‘man’.