"Outside of here it's death": Codependency and the Ghosts of Decolonization in Beckett's Endgame

"What impact do the long history of Ireland's emergence from British rule and the central role of literature in Irish nationalism have on the work of Samuel Beckett?" After decades of reading Beckett, alongside Joyce, as an exemplary author of exile, cosmopolitan existentialism, and postnationalist modernism, literary critics have finally begun, and I think rightly, to turn their attention to this difficult, but pertinent, question. The merit of an Irish historical recontextualization of Beckett's work has recently been the subject of book-length studies by Beckett scholars Mary Junker and John Harrington, and chapter-length studies by Irish cultural and postcolonial studies scholars David Lloyd and Declan Kiberd. 1 These studies argue that to enhance our understanding of Beckett we must reconsider the influence that Irish colonial and literary history and an Irish background have on his work (Junker and Harrington), or read his texts in the context of such pertinent colonial and postcolonial themes as language dispossession, oppressive empires, flawed nationalisms, postcolonial identity, and the philosophical or psychological underpinnings of the condition of exile (Kiberd and Lloyd).