"Krapp’s Last Tape" by Samuel Beckett: Sound Missives of an Epistolary Self-Correspondence

Abstract

The present article analyses the play Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) by Samuel Beckett. The study takes as its starting point the interpretation of its protagonist’s activity as an epistolary correspondence with himself through time, and by means of a new modality of it: the sound missive. In this way, the author stages both epistolary listening/reading and recording/writing between a present self and its past/future self, which acquire a spatial and temporal materiality in contrast to its literary realisation. Besides, this unique self-correspondence allows the expression of the character’s subjectivity and of his internal split, evidenced by the impossibility of the self-recogniton and the self-objectivation that define the epistolary activity. The letter thus becomes a new element of the independence of the theatrical from the literary postulated by the Theatre of the Absurd, of which Beckett is an epitome.