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In Beckett's work gray becomes a serial motif that brings a number of tonal values to his writing for the stage. Gray supports spatial, visual, and narrative ambiguity, and its effects highlight the conditional states that characterize subject, object, and image. As his work develops, shades of the color gray become more nuanced, but their status as key players in his work can be observed as early as Godot and Endgame. His experience as a writer for the mechanical media has a profound influence on the role shades of gray have on the concept and coordination of the new and profound images his late work brings to the stage.
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'Gray, grayness, graying' - gray as a verb, as a noun, as an adjective, as a process - evoke an enigmatic world that is neutral and unstable, an intermediate zone fading from darkness to light, then suddenly back again. An endpoint that is always on the verge of becoming something else again, gray is both a beginning and an end, diminution as well as potential, ashes but also fertile - very fertile - gray matter. Place a palette of grays next to any item of another color - a few leaves, a blood-stained handkerchief, a carrot, a mouth, a banana - and its weary hues come alive with an unsuspected dynamism, a 'less' that has quickly turned into quite a bit more. An imperfect lessness at best (depending on how you look at it), gray, when it stands stoutly and proudly on its own, can also be more than enough to sustain an entire fictional world.
In Beckett's work gray, the color gray, becomes a vast serial motif in a wide range of genre. Mixtures of black and white, shades of the color gray bring a variety of tonal values to his writing, and the different properties he assigns to them display a subtle coordination of rich textual effects. Beckett's shades of the color gray everywhere encourage spatial, visual, even narrative ambiguity, and their conditional states stretch across subject, object, image, temporality, and indeed over the color gray itself. In the accomplished fiction of his productive middle period, the bold and uncompromising novels popularly known as the trilogy, gray is thematized as a grim...