Tope-EniObanke Adegoke

Samuel Beckett’s The End is a quintessential embodiment of absurdist literature, interrogating an uncompromisingly bleak vision of human existence that is as disorienting as it is profound. The fact that the first version of the story was published in a journal co-founded by Jean-Paul Sartre further approves of this understanding and cements its philosophical kinship with existentialist and absurdist thought, though I would say Beckett’s approach diverges from Sartre’s more prescriptive existentialism into a rawer, more fragmented confrontation with the void. Like Hemmingway's The Old Man and the Sea. The story opens with a nameless protagonist adrift in a world stripped of coherence and little sympathy, where physical decay and existential disorientation intertwine. The narrative’s fragmented structure and the protagonist’s evictions, cyclical wanderings - through dilapidated rooms, desolate landscapes, and fleeting human encounters - mirror the absurdist notion that life lacks an overarching purpose or telos. Unlike Sartre’s emphasis on individual agency to create meaning as in the play No Exit, Beckett’s story leans into the absurdity of such endeavours, portraying a world where actions, relationships, and even memory dissolve into futility. The protagonist’s repetitive, almost ritualistic behaviours, such as his fixation on mundane objects or his futile attempts to find refuge, echo Albert Camus’s concept of the absurd as the tension between humanity’s desire for meaning and the universe’s indifferent silence.

Some books are just pure, unadulterated entertainment. Biyi Bandele's The Sympathetic Undertaker & Other Dreams is one of them. The two brothers in the novel are pure fun. It's a curious thing, though, that so little humour seems to have survived in contemporary Nigerian fiction.

While ambitious and commendable, the theatrics fall flat on the page .

This is a play linguists, lexicographers would like. The conflict is subtle and relatable as an African who emerged from the English colonisation.

It was a good read. The dialogue works well and there is nothing redundant about it.