An Act Without Words or An Act Without Agency?: A Review of Samuel Beckett’s “Act Without Words”
Aleen Xue
A man is thrown onto an artificial set consisting of a too-blue depthless sky and too-perfect sandy peaked hills. This invites questions—who is this man and how did he get a shirt and pants the exact same shade of tan as the sand? Did he have a life before this moment? Or is his life only beginning now? Regardless, his life is this now—every time he tries to escape out of the rectangular camera frame, some invisible force, signaled by a gong, hurls him back. Like Truman in The Truman Show, perhaps this man is also a victim of the viewers, his life created to be perceived through the lens of the media.
Various objects are lowered onto the set, including a palm tree, scissors, and boxes. Unfortunately, the invisible force, petty like a Greek god, always makes things difficult. The palm tree closes its leaves when the man sits down in the shade. When the man finally realizes that he can stack two boxes to reach the flask of water, it moves away even higher. Even the branch of the palm tree, which the man contemplates hanging himself from, is lowered. He faces a curse not unlike that of Tantalus: everything he craves is just out of reach. So then, I wonder, is this just a makeshift hell? A Truman Show-like experiment? Or perhaps both are one and the same.
I thoroughly enjoyed the ending. When the rope and scissors are taken away, even the man’s power to end his own life is robbed. He watches as the water floats by, within his grasp. He doesn’t reach for it—is it because he has resigned to the fact that he has no control over his environment? Or is this his final act of agency—a flipping off of the Greek gods by choosing to expedite his own death through dehydration? I’d like to think the latter, as the play ends with him staring at his hands, agents of power even in a world that we cannot control.
Aleen Xue, class of 2025, majors in English and minors in Psychology. She is from Montgomery, NJ, and intends on pursuing the 5 Year Masters in K-12 English Education through the Rutgers GSE. When she’s not tinkering with words, she can be found dancing, painting, and pampering her cat Mochi.
Aleen wrote this piece in a course taught by Paul Blaney, who selected it for inclusion in WHR.