Decoding Samuel Beckett's Dramatic Codes in Footfalls

Decoding Samuel Beckett's Dramatic Codes in Footfalls

Samuel Beckett's play, Footfalls, strips the stage of 'reality' in its full dimension: the characters are reduced to a faintly and unevenly lit figure onstage and an invisible offstage voice; complicated and dynamic human relationships are replaced with a feeble connection between the two objects; and the development of diverse events is restricted to the figure's "revolving" movement on the small strip onstage against the powerful darkness and her and the voice's fragmentary and isolated speech acts that allude to events in the past. Confronted with this highly fragmentary dramatic situation, the audience has to involve itself in a restless process to create a shape to Beckett's "faint" dramatic world. Within the audience's creative act of decoding the dramatic world, the sole figure onstage is gradually animated to a "shade" of a human being. Her restricted world becomes an epitome of human reality, and the fragmentary and yet structured action of the play represents a human being's struggle and inevitable failure to understand its world. Undermining the audience's process of decoding the dramatic world, the play then presents pure absence onstage at the end in an attempt to let the audience experience the abyss of its inability. Acknowledging that Beckett's intention is to stage and let the audience experience a human being's futile struggle to understand its existential world and dramatic world respectively, this paper explores how the play arranges the elements of drama in a way that invites the audience to work with potentials, suggestions, and indeterminacy and discover the abstractions of human reality from the images and actions onstage. The paper at the same time discusses how the limited, fragmentary, and yet selected actions onstage lead the audience to a more involved act of decoding the dramatic world where the character's attempts to decode the self's image is enacted. Attention is then given to the play's ending, which subverts the dramatic world itself in order to suggest the onstage figure's powerless bewilderment at her own self-image and ultimately the audience's experience of its own impotence and ignorance.