P.P. Cuellar and Hamm

 

 

What a contrast between the beginning of life for P.P. Cuellar in The Cubs by Mario Vargas Llosa and the end of life for Hamm in Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame.   P.P. Cuellar suffers through his life with an embarrassing injury that he received while very young. He is surrounded by many friends as we follow him through adolescence and a downward spiral of risky behavior which ends in his premature death.  While P.P. is surrounded by friends during his short life, Hamm suffers from isolation and a lack of friends in his old age, finding himself totally dependent on his helper Clov and memories of his parents, who “pop up” from time to time.  Even the style of writing of the two stories accentuates this difference.

P.P. grows up, surrounded by friends who at first tease him about his injury, giving him the nickname “P.P.”.  Later they try to get him to go steady with a girl and seem to be unaware of his fear of what might happen if the couple ever decided to have sex.  We watch with sadness as this physical affliction sets him apart from his friends and leads to occasional fights and alienation from friends. As he grows older he obviously feels he can’t participate in the “dating game” that his friends enjoy.  His abuse of himself continues throughout adolescence with occasional lapses into acceptable behavior, before returning to his downward spiral of self-destruction.  Throughout his short life his friends encourage him and act as a force pushing him toward more acceptable social behavior, but he always reverts to destructive behavior in spite of the affection shown by his friends.

Hamm, on the contrary, doesn’t seem to have any friends, other than one mentioned in the play who is in a psychiatric hospital.  He is totally dependent on Clov to tell him what is going on in the world outside, and he treats the helper with much disdain and British coldness.  While he is in the “endgame” of life, we don’t know much about Hamm or Clov other than a few places in the play where insinuations are made about how Clov came to live with Hamm and the relationship that Hamm had with his parents.  The reader must imagine for himself/herself how Hamm came to this isolated state in old age and why he has no friends. 

The language used in the two works provides a sharp contrast.  Llosa uses a “chatty” writing style that mimics the conversational tone of young people, interrupting each other’s thoughts, and running together in a constant flow of narrative that could be sung like a quartet with different voices coming in before the previous one finishes his/her thought.  In spite of the broken chain of thought in the writing, Llosa gives us a fairly clear picture of what was going on in the story. 

In contrast, Beckett’s sparse style leaves much to the reader’s imagination.  We can only imagine why Hamm is so isolated, where Clov came from, and what his parents are doing popping up out of trash cans.  But this style emphasizes the isolation of the two main characters and their symbiotic relationship which shows how they are both dependent on each other because they have no other friends.  This writing style also emphasizes the bleakness and coldness of the environment in which the story takes place, and adds to the gloomy mood of the play.

Both “P.P.” and Hamm end their life isolated and alone.  The circumstances leading up to the conclusion of both stories provide a contrast between youthful isolation and isolation in old age.  But both lives end with sadness for the reader.