The setting of almost all of Samuel Beckett's work is that of Krapp's Last Tape, written in 1958: "A late evening in the future." The future is not a place, and not much of a time; it is a guess, a possibility, a threat. We may say it is in the head, and that is where Beckett's characters often think they are: in an "imaginary head," an "abandoned head"; "we are needless to say in a skull"; "perhaps we're in a head, it's as dark as in a head before the worms get at it, ivory dungeon." But the head in this meaning is not a place either. It is a metaphor, a spatialization of the unseeable mind, and it is important not to be taken in by the familiarity of the figure….

Another name, another metaphor for this nonplace is limbo, the home of "those nor for God...