Images of Beckett - Index of

144 IMAGES OF BECKETT
consulted by Krapp was large, worn and black in
colour, while Beckett wanted the dictionary to be
bound in a light-coloured leather. Many of Krapp’s
actions and movements were again determined to
some extent by Gnostic divisions. In the
preliminary action, Krapp stepped into the
darkness surrounding the table before returning
to his zone of light and threw the banana skins
and remaining piece of banana into the darkness.
During the play, he looked slowly around him
(looking for death, with whom he shortly has
an unscheduled appointment) on three separate
occasions and walked through the dark on his
way to the second area of light in his cubby-hole.
Directing the play, Beckett chose, then, to
highlight the external manifestations of the
divisions that lie at its thematic centre.
With repetition above all perhaps, Beckett’s
most frequently used device, ‘structure and
meaning blend into one another’. 129 To take only
one example, repetition lies, for instance, at the
very heart of Krapp’s Last Tape. With both his
‘listening to an old year, passages at random’ and
his birthday recording, Krapp repeats a ceremony
that he has been performing for the past forty-five
years. The many repetitions and echoes link Krapp
with his former self, and yet allow us to perceive
discontinuity as well – to hear some of the same
ideas and phrases, and yet to note the change of
voice and tone and see his decline from assurance
to slightly bitter resignation mixed with nostalgic
Niamh Cusack in Not I, 1999