"Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss"
About this Quote
A request for damnation that doubles as a demand to stay audible: Beckett turns the afterlife into a petty, administrative battleground where even eternal bliss can be heckled. The line is funny in the bleakest possible way. “Let me go to hell” isn’t contrition; it’s strategy. Hell becomes less a punishment than a platform, a place from which the speaker can keep doing what Beckett’s characters do best: persist, complain, refuse closure.
The intent is pointedly anti-redemptive. Most religious narratives promise reconciliation or at least silence at the end. Beckett offers neither. The speaker doesn’t ask to be saved, improved, or understood. He asks to continue cursing “them” - a vague pronoun that matters because it keeps the grievance abstract and therefore inexhaustible. “Them” can be God, the fortunate, the comfortable, the already-dead, the people who got away with it. The lack of specificity is the fuel: the target can never be settled, so the anger can never be completed.
The subtext is envy weaponized into metaphysics. “Take some of the shine off their bliss” is a savage little phrase: happiness is treated like a polished surface that can be dulled by a voice rising from below. It’s a fantasy of sabotage as agency, the last remaining power for someone locked out of consolation.
Contextually, this sits squarely in Beckett’s postwar, post-faith landscape where meaning has thinned out and endurance replaces salvation. Even eternity is reduced to a spatial arrangement and an acoustics problem: can suffering still be heard? Beckett’s answer is a curse that refuses to die.
The intent is pointedly anti-redemptive. Most religious narratives promise reconciliation or at least silence at the end. Beckett offers neither. The speaker doesn’t ask to be saved, improved, or understood. He asks to continue cursing “them” - a vague pronoun that matters because it keeps the grievance abstract and therefore inexhaustible. “Them” can be God, the fortunate, the comfortable, the already-dead, the people who got away with it. The lack of specificity is the fuel: the target can never be settled, so the anger can never be completed.
The subtext is envy weaponized into metaphysics. “Take some of the shine off their bliss” is a savage little phrase: happiness is treated like a polished surface that can be dulled by a voice rising from below. It’s a fantasy of sabotage as agency, the last remaining power for someone locked out of consolation.
Contextually, this sits squarely in Beckett’s postwar, post-faith landscape where meaning has thinned out and endurance replaces salvation. Even eternity is reduced to a spatial arrangement and an acoustics problem: can suffering still be heard? Beckett’s answer is a curse that refuses to die.
Quote Details
| Topic | Anger |
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