Samuel Beckett’s short play Krapp’s Last Tape appears to offer a sad conclusion; its protagonist is old, lonely, and drunk, he is bitter towards the promises of life and aware of an approaching end, and he has apparently jettisoned the habit of recording annual retrospectives on his birthdays. The play ends in a protracted silence except for the sound of a tape player running to no purpose while Krapp stares silently into an apparent void. One’s first reaction is to suggest that the play posits an existence characterized by the individual’s growing awareness of meaninglessness and his arrival at despair. However, an examination of Beckett’s criticism of Marcel Proust leads quickly to a qualified interpretation—that despite his condition Krapp is in a state of transport at the play’s conclusion as he is buoyed by his “involuntary memory” of his dalliance on the punt. As Proust, according to Beckett, projects in his fiction an existence dependent on and in conflict with Time against which the individual can find joy only in the “involuntary memory”, so does Beckett demonstrate in Krapp’s Last Tape the struggle against the effects of time alleviated only by the surprising emergence of an unacknowledged significant memory. Beckett published Proust in 1931 while in Paris lecturing at École Normale Supérieure and investigating Joyce and his circle. Beckett identifies in his analysis Proust’s obsession with the force of Time. “Proust’s creatures,” he says, “are victims of this predominating condition and circumstance—Time … There is no escape from the hours and the days” (Beckett, Proust 12-13). The notion of the inexorable passage of time is new to neither literature nor human consideration in other forms, nor is the suggestion that time destroys, but most equate the destruction by time with a literal death, a death of an organism. According to Beckett, however, Proust demonstrates that time continually destroys and reconstitutes the self: “We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday … The aspirations of yesterday were valid for yesterday’s ego, not for to-day’s” (13). As a result of the constant destruction of the various selves that constitute us, “We are disappointed at the nullity of what we are pleased to call attainment” (13-14). Any accomplishment, then, disappears as the self disappears; time reduces what we often insist are significant achievements to fantasies or ch>