Endgame, as the very title suggests, is about ends or an end. Its opening words, 'Finished, it's finished...' pervade the action, or perhaps rather inaction, that follows, and throughout the play Beckett, like Shakespeare in King Lear, employs a lexicon of decay and nothingness that implies an apocalypse. Clov sees 'zero' when he examines the beyond with his telescope, the anonymous painter and engraver views only ashes from the window to which he is …showed first 75 words of 1040 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1040 total…on doing so perpetually, trapped within the drama. Hamm and Clov are very much aware of the roles in which they have been imprisoned; they are self-conscious fictions that recognise their own inability to free themselves from the necessity not only of living, but also of acting. Renewal becomes a vicious circle that reinforces, rather than defies, the suffering and it is in this sickening irony that the essential tragedy of Endgame may be found.