The protagonist of Krapp’s Last Tape is certain that he possesses the talent to change the world with his art but the focus of Beckett’s play is how Krapp’s certainty is worn down to a terrible moment of doubt and despair. Krapp ultimately realizes that nothing will ever be different and that his masterpiece has had no effect whatsoever in the world. The fact that Krapp wasted his life in pursuit of such a grandiose ‘‘vision’’ (as he calls it) marks the play as one of Beckett’s most ironic and chilling works.
Like all of Beckett’s work, Krapp’s Last Tape may strike the first-time viewer as odd and unsettling: there is a minimal set, no dramatic lighting cues, nothing that a theatergoer would call a traditional ‘‘plot,’’ and only one character, a character whose only conversations are with a tape recording of himself that he made thirty years ago. However, many of the play’s original reviewers noted the force that Beckett was able to contain in what initially seems like the framework (rather than the final draft) of a play. [http://www.enotes.com/krapps-last]