Krapp's Last Tape takes place at a desk bathed in light from an overhead lamp. Krapp, (...) sits there caught in a cycle begun in his twenties, of recording events of his life on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. What once had begun as a a ritual event of self-examination has taken on an obssesive narcissistic cast that prevents Krapp from living anything else but recording, not only events in the present , but responses to his audition of old tapes, which take on even more importance than present life experiences. Krapp's degenerated physical state shows the effects of his obssesion with the ungraspable object of his life. His condition is exacerbated by alcoholism (...) as well as a steady diet on bananas, inducing constipation, a physical sympton of the fear of lossing any part of the self to inevetability of time and decay. As many of Beckett's plays, it is repetitive behaviour that convinces one of one's existance.
text: http://www.msu.edu/user/sullivan/BeckettKrapp.html
Krapp`s method is a battle against time , a desire, if not for pure self-presence, then for repeated moments of hapinness. It is an attempt at the complete mastery of past experience. It is the desire, expressed through the yearly rundown of peaks moments, to have all of his temporal existence before him at any moment: in other words, the total spatialization of his personality in time.
But this attempt only works against itself. While Krapp thinks he is articulating his life, that is, joining elements of it coherently, he only disarticulates himself into separate spools. At the same time the past takes on a greateer sense of presence than the present itself. While his voice and certain memories retain their sensous strenght on the old tape, the present Krapp becomes ever more a ghost of what has been recorded: a strange reversal, since the disembodied voice would seem more the ghost. (...)
Krapp exists in a paradoxical state: is he "being" or is he "remaining"?(...) While he has developed a complex system to retain the vibrancy of his past, he is at the same time an outrageous drunk, and after all, he driks to forget. And it would seem that he wants to forget what might have been the purpose of his system. (...) This is common in Beckett's characters , a kind of absolute ambivalence that keeps them in perpetual but undecidede motion. Words than drain from minds that are never made up, and words that provide the escape of the necessety to decide or act. It is the inability to remember the past, excepts as fragments, that estimulates repetitive actions, more than the Nietzschean will to repeat, which is fully conscious and affirmative. But it is at the same time the experience of the unexpected memories that creates the despair of repetition. After the repeated attempts to get outside of habit, that of drinking, the old habit of remembering again takes over to evoke the reality of the past. It is like the situation in which a distracted person wanders into a room where must ask himself, what did I came here for? So he traces his steps to provoke the mind back into memory of his original intention.
