'Certainty they beat me'-who is beaten by whom? |

This utterance, like many others in this intriguing play, is a reference to the seemingly random acts of pain, violence, and injustice that Life brings to all of us, part of Beckett’s claim that Life, far from being a pleasant state, is a sort of curse, because we must all “crawl through the mud” of physical existence. In the play the line is a response by Gogo to Didi’s question about how he spent the...

This utterance, like many others in this intriguing play, is a reference to the seemingly random acts of pain, violence, and injustice that Life brings to all of us, part of Beckett’s claim that Life, far from being a pleasant state, is a sort of curse, because we must all “crawl through the mud” of physical existence. In the play the line is a response by Gogo to Didi’s question about how he spent the night in a ditch. The pronoun “They” is intentionally without antecedent, as a way of expressing the nonhuman and therefore unattributable and unretaliated nature of all our “beatings," a part of our very existence. Often in our own lives we will experience an injustice or a physical condition bringing pain, and we vaguely ask “Why me?” and “I don’t deserve this.” These are the moments Beckett is referring when Gogo says “Certainly they beat me.”