How Many Stories?

Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape includes in its narration some of the best dose of metafiction i've seen so far. Its is, simplified to its absurd maximum, the narration of a man listening to himself in the past, or is it not. It is obviously the same man whose listening and speaking in the tape, and the author makes no intent to hide this. But when we become immersed in the words, in how they are said, when they are said, and so many details, we begin to trace their difference so far back that they appear to be different people. It becomes a story about a man who sits in front of a recording to listen the narration of another story which in the end happens to be his own story told by someone else, another Krapp. Yes, a little redundant, as intended. No not very structured, aloof in a condition his own.

There are two stories, the one about the young man and his best days, and the one about the man listening to this story (if we exclude the third story about the reader, which we must forget, but will for the purpose of simplicity). And the situation mirrors the other, for they both follow the same patters as is the banana eating ritual and the recording of memories. In a way there are two stories that intertwine in telling a single story about a same person, so different in his two states that it would be impossible to recur to a single story and have it make sense.

The Krapp under the white hair denies his past in many ways by failing to listen to the story, be that by ignoring it, skipping forward on the tape or merely distracticting himself with some grotesque gesture. When he skips the tape he challenges his condition, for it implies that a man who has lost his memory remembers something or at least a hint of it as something unpleasant. And his connection to the story, at least in the video, is depicted by his gestures, the every detail of these.

But there would be no point whatsoever in telling two stories about a same person if, when included in his story, that person experiences no reaction. The evolution in character from the moment the tape start to the final words is evident, again, through the gestures of the contemporaneous Krapp. His expressions change, his movement, the speed which with he moves his lips, his every action. And what is most impressive is the way the same person changes in his two stories, for when we listen to Krapp record his words they are much faster, less thought of, almost clumsy.

Nearing the end we witness what seems, at least at first, to be a drop of saliva build up in his lips. As we detail his face in search of an explanation for such an unprecedented reaction, we begin to see light reflect in the tears streaming down his face. Krapp is genuinely crying to himself. He finds his other self admitting that his "best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back." He begins to find that he is not so content with the way he used to think, with the words coming out of the other man's mouth. Maybe this other story made him yearn for more, yet another story, a third (or fourth) story, a story about his second chance at happiness.