In October 1945 things became too tense for Beckett in Paris, so he and

Suzanne fled into the unoccupied zone. After a tortuous ordeal traveling incognito

through occupied territory,they ended up in a mountain village called Roussillon

in the Vaucluse. This trip and the period waiting out the war in Roussillon was the

crucible out of which all of Beckett's post-war writing came.¹¹

Throughout ENDGAME is the notion of being in hiding. There is the

suggestion that some widespread catastrophe has occurred and the "room" in

which the play is set is some sort of bunker where there is refuge. An important

component of the cosmology of ENDGAME is centered on this sense of a safe

"inside" in opposition to a dangerous "outside."

The presumed heroism of Beckett's work with the resistance is difficult to

account for in his writing except that, it is doubtful that he engaged in his resistance

activity with any sort of optimism. He was probably more haunted by the despair

that he saw around him and the hopelessness of resisting the Nazis than filled with

any sense of accomplishment for what he did contribute.¹²Indeed there is a sense of

confession in Hamm, as if Beckett had collaborated or even been involved directly

with perpetrating the horrors of World War Two.

In an early draft of FIN DE PARTIE, the French text that became ENDGAME,

the characters who became Hamm and Clov were clearly drawn as two French

soldiers who were hiding out during the First World War. This is eventually

paired down to the point that there is little or no indication of specific period or

occupation for the characters.

On an instinctual level, I sense a strong link between the situation of

ENDGAME and the last forty eight hours of Adolf Hitler's life in his bunker in