Dualities Of Haunting Memories And Nostalgia In Samuel Beckett’s Ohio Impromptu

Postmodern literature is a form of literature emerged in the post-World War II era which is marked, both stylistically and ideologically, by a reliance on such literary conventions as fragmentation, paradox, unreliable narrators, often unrealistic and downright impossible plots, games, parody, paranoia, dark humour and authorial self-reference. Postmodern authors are very frustrated for World War II, the Cold War and conspiracy theories so they try to express it from indirect way. Postmodern authors were certainly not the first to use irony and humor in their writing but it’s common for postmodernists to treat serious subjects in a playful and humorous way. Postmodernism rejects that which Modernism champions.

Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906-1989) is concerned as one of the leading dramatists of the post-modern era, who represent the shift from modernism to post modernism. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. He is the most famous and well-known absurdist playwright. Absurd works focused largely on the idea of existentialism and expressed what happens when human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down. Beckett was very interested, not just in plot and story, but in language, its structure and form. Because of that it’s inevitable that it makes room for, and inspires artists. He brought revolutionary changes in the standards and rules by which a drama has been appreciated from many centuries. From 1945 onwards, Beckett started to focus more and more on the failings of modernism, art, and language as a type of expression. Raymond Federman argued that postmodernism had died with Beckett in 1989. In approaching Beckett we must give up asking what any of his plays is intended to mean. The only possible reply to such a question is Beckett himself said: “If I could tell you in a sentence I wouldn’t have written the play. ” And “If I knew, I would have said so in the play. ” If so, his plays would have been something absolutely different. His avoidance of definition is implicit in work. His plays also have the minimum of plot and characterization. Another distinctive feature of Beckett’s plays is that his characters exist and can exist only for as long as the play lasts, indeed only for as long as they are before our eyes. Beckett gives us no hint as to how they have come to the situation in which we find them. They have no past except for what they may tell us, and no future. At the end of the play, they will be practically unchanged. One of such play is now taken for discussion. Ohio impromptu is a playlet by Samuel Beckett in 1980 and one of his last plays. It captures that universally human emotion of losing the one loved results in haunting memory and nostalgia. Here in the play, two identical men sit at a table.

One reads, the other listens. The reader reads a story about a person who came to Isles of swan to forget his beloved. But his beloved’s memory haunts him and he understands his mistake of coming to an unfamiliar land, but his mistakes can’t be undone. Soon he meets an apparition coming to him at night and says he was sent to him by his beloved to relieve him and starts to read ‘a sad story’ and when he finishes disappears without a word. Again the same story reappears the other night and he disappears without a word but one night when he finishes reading he doesn’t disappear but said this will be his final visit as that person’s beloved said and vanishes. The listener occasionally knocks on the table when he wants a passage repeated. By reading this story reader closes his volume saying ‘nothing is to tell’. Then they see each other for a while and the reader vanishesThrough this depiction it is clear that as a postmodern work Ohio impromptu includes: fragmentation by the presence of doppelganger may be as listener’s alter ego, change of landscape to isles of swan affecting behavioral pattern with haunting memories, hyper reality by the presence of reader as an apparition, dualities as it discusses two parts of a haunting memory, unrealistic narrator; because here beckett says us a story in which reader says a story to listener in which a man says a story to other so story within a story with no exact narrator.

Of all these features, dualities which deals with the presence of exact opposite under the same roof, is sought in detail. As a work in duality Ohio impromptu possess dual parts like birth and death, light and dark, something and nothing, real and unreal, isolation and union, past and present, loss and comfort and finally speech and silence. Here Birth, the beginning of something, is the new life listener starts after the departure of his beloved and the new beginning of the arrival of apparition. Death, termination of an event, is the life which listener had with his beloved is dead which can never comeback similarly; he left to isles of swans from where he can’t return. Light, the hope that apparition had in relieving listener from pain, the happiness which listener had with his beloved in whose absence listener’s light gone from his life and completely darkened with depression because he couldn’t even sleep because his beloved haunts him in dream “no sleep no braving sleep till”, he was gloomy because he can’t undo his action and had to survive between reality and hyper reality. Reality is the memory which haunts listener in his dream so listener understands his mistake but can’t be undone so, hyper reality gives listener an apparition to recall his nostalgia to relieve him from his real situation of depression old terror of nights hence he struggles in real event but rescued in unreal event. When the reader starts reading his pages to listener he states “Little is left to tell” and when he finishes he says “Nothing is left to tell” this shows the quantity of purpose carried by messenger and the delivered message to their difference. Initially when the listener came to isles of swans he was alone and isolated from his beloved “to a single room on a far bank” but later he was accompanied by the reader in apparition. Though, all through their meeting they haven’t spoken yet they are united by the sad tale and felt union as one “with never a word exchanged they grew to be as one”. In real they are unknown to each other and never spoken directly but indirectly through their tale they express their speech in silence. Thus the initial loss listener had by his beloved was later comforted by the presence of reader in apparition.

Through this paper I conclude that as a work of duality Ohio impromptu portrays its character’s transformation from loss to comfort, from life to death, from speech to silence and other dualities as an intermediate for this. Overall the past made an error in present that makes real survive through unreal where isolated loss comforted in union through direct silence and indirect speech which begins with little and ends with nothing like Beckett said this story to us with no past and future but remains in present and telling never ceases. The story continues in duality, with duality and depicts duality.