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This paper illuminates the carnivalesque subversion in Samuel Beckett’s plays in terms of Mikhail Bakhtin’s view of the world including grotesque realism and carnivalistic laughter. According to Bakhtin, a carnival is temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and the established order. Bakhtin’s carnival is thus linked to the image of grotesque realism, which is characterized by degradation, incompleteness, and ambivalent levels of death and birth. Rabelais’s world is an example par excellence. In this regard, a carnival reveals the dualistic and ambivalent quality of life based on degradation in grotesque realism. Likewise, Samuel Beckett’s plays reveal the existential despair through duality of life and death, which is theatrically substantiated through those grotesque images as mound of Happy Days and Zeno’s heap of Endgame. Though Beckett suggests that this world is filled with grotesque images of despair and death, he also unveils even unhappiness can be an object of laughter. On the strength of life’s dualistic and ambivalent quality, despair can be paradoxically changed to hope.
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carnival, subversion, Bakhtin, play, Beckett
