Much Obliged: Beckett, MacIntyre, and the Emotivist Endgame

Abstract: This article demonstrates how Samuel Beckett’s Endgame fleshes out the implausible entailments of a world premised on the emotivist understanding of the self –– on a noncognitivist conception of metaethical anti-realism, which is precisely the moral theory of meaning that Alasdair MacIntyre sets out to dismantle in After Virtue . I delineate an analogy between MacIntyre’s critique of post-Enlightenment conceptions of obligation and Beckett’s staging of moral incoherence and interpersonal manipulation parodied throughout Endgame .