The setting of Endgame is characteristic of a Beckett work; furniture reduced to the bare minimum. A bare stage, a poetic symbol and parody of traditional theatre, with only two rubbish bins, a chair and an upside down painting to look at. High up on the walls we get a glimpse of the rest of Beckett's empty universe through the small windows that look out. "On these tables of disaster the characters play their negligible role." (Fletcher, 48) Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Traditional theater attempts to put a slice of life on stage for the audience to enjoy. The general idea is to trick the audience into thinking they're watching something they've seen before. For example, a cockroach-infested apartment or even a relatively simple office scene helps you relate to the characters before they speak. We know what to expect because we know the situation of the starving artist with his small apartment and we already expect the businessman to be very stressed. Beckett sets his text in a place we have never been, and God willing, a place that will never exist: a kind of bunker, resembling the inside of a skull with its neuroses squabbling within it. When the curtain opens on a place like that then, the only thing you can do is start preparing for what might inhabit such an environment. The gap between the world we live in and the one before us was established before any of the characters opened their mouths, and it's up to us as the audience to figure out where we stand. As we discover, slowly but surely, we are at the end of the world. Comedian Lewis Black claims to have seen the end of the world in Texas when he found a street with a Starbucks directly across from another Starbucks, but Beckett made the end of the world the kind of place where the question "what time is it ?" evokes the response: “Same as usual.” The action in this play, if you can call it that, is a Beckettian standard of people moving around the stage and talking for the sole purpose of quelling boredom. They talk and talk anticipating the arrival of death and, like Godot, the sweet release of death never comes (with the exception of Nell who is the only one to ask the direct question: "Why this farce every day?"). The only thing that separates these miserable characters from death is the mindless boredom of their lives. Clov knows better than anyone that there is nothing to see on the horizon, but taking the ladder, going up and down and even dropping the telescope on purpose helps pass the hours of the day. What other possible reason, other than to ward off insanity, could there be for telling the same joke over and over again? Not to mention fondly remembering the first time the joke was told before telling it. "The Beckettian hero is a sort of clown who uses words and makes gestures that have the aim of entertaining, to pass the time. But unlike a real clown, he tries not to amuse others, but to deceive his own boredom ; he acts, but for himself." (Fletcher, 58) This is the kind of world where the action sequence is considered a half-starved man moving slowly and pushing a crippled old man's chair in a circle. They have the same conversations over and over, reflect on being forgotten by nature. It would seem that nature plays no role in the meaninglessness on stage, but they are confronted with the reality of nature continuing to age their bodies. Despite the absence of meaning they continue with their monotonous lives. To offer an explanation for this behavior Hamm says: "We do what we can", and Clov responds, 1999. 93-137.