The End

This story begins as many of Beckett's short stories, with the speaker being "thrown out". The End seems to be a culmination of all the stories before beginning with First Love. Beckett revisits many themes from the previous stories as well. The speaker is being pushed out of his safe zone constantly. This relays a universal human fear of a world out of the control of the self. The vast majority of human beings deal with this expulsion by identifying with some immortal concept, be it God, lover, nation, etc. Here the normal human being is then found lost in the vastness of the association of the self with an idea too big for itself. The individual wants to reflexively be special, which contradicts the first association. Beckett's character seems to have let go of any desire to be part of the immortal concept. He does not want to be part of society, has no desire for love, and has no trust in a God-like figure. Neither, does he try to be special, to be somebody. He simply exists, almost instinctually. His relationship to his father sums up the speaker's concept of his relationship to the world. "I would have liked him [the father] to draw me close with a gesture of protective love, but his mind was on other things." He seems to feel as though the immortal figures in his life do not really care about him, and therefore he does not even care about himself, or even the self. He is simply physical. He says he has no "courage to end or the strength to go on." He needs the strength of a false immortality which he cannot attract, or he needs the courage to make him stand apart from mortality, which he does not possess. Instead, he simply allows life to happen with constant sensory input, until death happens without fear naturally.