Subject in Krapp's Last Tape

A superficial review of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape shows a seemingly straightforward, one-act, one-character presentation of one person. It is, however, like many other works of Beckett a play that fails to be simple and straightforward. A closer examination of the work not only returns many layers of meaning and significance but also a multiplicity of subjects accumulated in the seemingly the same entity as Krapp.

The play is set in an indefinite future that is not seemingly very different from our present. Krapp is a presence inside a world of contrasts lost in the black and white of the light/dark setting. It is this very setting that not only signals The stark oppositions in the play but also becomes a means through which the spatio-temporal boundaries of the reality can be crossed resulting in a Krapp that not only moves in time but also in and out of consciousness: becoming both Krapp as a person identifiable through his bodily presence and Krapp as a form of internal representation of what lies outside especially his own memories. It is in this sense that we not only have Krapp in his late twenties, thirties and sixties but also Krapp as what an Other can see from outside and one who can only be identified if one reaches through his eyes to the deepest darkness within his soul. Beckett by seemingly creating this one character and then giving rise to his many failures, fragments and differentiates people who if not occupying the same body would not be otherwise associated with each other. The future Krapp's are never the fulfillment of their predecessors' expectations and to return the favor they look upon their previous recordings of self with the same abhorrence and dissatisfaction. Thus the play provides its audience not with a unified "I" but with multiple I's all looking at their predecessor/progeny as a "he" (detached and Other).

To have an overall view of the subject in Krapp's Last Tape is to see a challenge to Freudian or Lacanian stability of the subject and coming to a destabilized Kristevan subject who is not only a process but even more than that strangers all and all gathered in what traditionally is believed to be one. It is through Beckett's mastery that the audience will come to question not only Krapp's unity and truth but through him even that of themselves. Krapp's fragmentation of identity is further emphasized through the failure of not only his multiplicity of selves but also that of his memory where his past can use even words that are unfamiliar to him. It is a fissure that further develops through Beckett's reductive language that diminishes the possibilities and potentials within its structure, presenting his audience with a stark naked reality of solitude and dejection.