SOURCE: Catanzaro, Mary. “Disconnected Voices, Displaced Bodies: The Dismembered Couple in Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, Happy Days, and Play.” In Literature and the Grotesque, edited by Michael J. Meyer, pp. 31-51. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995.

In the following essay, Catanzaro argues that the dismembered bodies of couples in Beckett's works are metaphors for the failure of communication in relationships.

Beckett's plays of the late 1950's and the 1960's can be read as grotesque commentaries on unsatisfying personal relationships caused by failure in communication. Krapp's Last Tape,¹ Happy Days,² and Play³ address the full range of separateness and otherness which undermine accord in intimate relationships. Within the scaffolding of failure in speech, the physical impediments and emotional ruptures reveal the subjects as subverted, segregated, and grotesque selves.

One of the complications arising from speech is that the subjects become aware of a need for an other whose presence might offer some...