“I is Another”: The Ruins of Language and Memory in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape

Abstract

In this article we investigate how in Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) language –as a structuring agent of memory– and thus the possibility of remembering through it, begins to become a ruin. In other words, how speech is not enough to reconstruct that which no longer exists in memory; it no longer serves, if it ever did. I will start my review from Eleutheria (1947), the first play by Samuel Beckett in which Victor Krap appears, who later in Krapp’s Last Tape will be the same and the other at the same time. Thus we will see how in the transition from one piece to the other, Krapp’s identity enters into crisis as a result of the progressive degradation of memory and the loss of meaning of words.