Endgame

Along with her husband, Nagg, Nell lost her legs in a tandem bike-riding accident many years ago. She now lives in a trashcan that sits next to Hamm’s chair. When she pokes her head out of the bin, she talks to Nagg, indulging him by trying to kiss him even though she knows they won’t be able to reach each other from their separate trashcans. When Nagg laughs at their son, Hamm, because he’s miserable, Nell tells him not to laugh at such things, though she goes on to assert that unhappiness is the funniest thing in the world. Still, though, she says it’s not worth laughing at suffering because such misery is like an old joke—it’s still funny, but one need not actually laugh at it. Like the other characters in Endgame, Nell is displeased with her circumstances and sees her everyday life as a “farce,” but she also approaches this with a sense of acceptance. It is perhaps for this reason that she is the only one to escape life’s misery by dying—after Nagg goes back into his trashcan, Nell falls into a kind of delirium state and Clov declares that she has no pulse before shutting her inside her trashcan. In this way, Nell is the only person in the entire play to experience an ending, though her death hardly affects Hamm and Clov, who barely register her passing, though Nagg—for his part—descends into his trashcan and weeps for the remainder of the play after she dies.