Happy Days | Quotes

Winnie wonders if Willie, situated in his hole behind her, can see her. She asks repeatedly then comments on the nature of seeing as more than the mere visual experience. This is another instance in which Beckett plumbs human experience while attempting a refinement of words. In both cases it is a push toward primal authenticity in experience and in its expression.

Winnie is a make-do person, and in finally being able to decipher the label on her toothbrush she finds satisfaction. She chides Willie for his lack of ambition, while the poignant moment reveals her adaptability to a world that offers almost nothing.

Winnie has had a painful moment in remembering Willie's attention to her beautiful hair on their wedding day. Words fail with the pain of this memory of what has been lost, and her defense is to return to the present moment and practical habit. In this movement she affirms the notion that all is not lost. The memory—and the glory and the pain—will return.

The blessing is the return of a memory that causes words to fail, a memory both affirming life in a better time and gesturing toward the relief of death.

Although Winnie has insisted she cannot live without Willie as the witness to her talk, she recognizes that the bag, the practical present with all of its demands, will still be with her—both as demand and as a memory prompt. The bag was Willie's gift to her.

She is thinking about what she has earlier called natural law. Now she is thinking about perspiration and how in her youth, she perspired freely, and now she perspires less even as the heat is more intense. Adaptation is not a matter of intention.

The pervasive notion of authenticity is expressed here (in a unity of feeling and expression by Winnie) as an irrational impulse lacking in intellectual deliberation being the evocation of wholeness. Impossible perhaps, yet Winnie is as close to a thrush as a human might be.

Winnie's reminiscence of happier times yields sorrow, which she resists by returning to the present time and Willie's continuing presence.

Winnie's parasol functions here as a metaphor for stasis in life, not unlike death, in contrast to the adventures and joys of a lively mind. Willie's passivity is a model for that much-feared stasis.

Winnie must keep talking to feel alive. As her mobility decreases, her speech, her memories, vivify her present.

Believing that she is alone, and still speaking, she observes that in her speech Willie is always there. Speech is, in part, memory, and Winnie keeps Willie alive in speaking about him.

This is wordplay that demonstrates how ideas or feelings operate through language when the words are specific to the context. She admits leaving the church and then uses the idea of confession secularized. Confess is a word that has lost its religious reference for Winnie and entered the secular world as the remnant of a strong feeling, perhaps guilt in leaving the church or verbal irony in the secular uses of confession.

Winnie reflects on pleasure and its aftermath, the (only initially) unexpected sadness. The wearing away is wonderful, so that a deep joy or pleasure remains unanticipated along with the sadness—that it may not repeat—or that the wearing away brings the shadow of death to the aftermath of pleasure.

Nothing is ever truly or totally forgotten. In this example it is the solace of art that can help someone at appropriate moments.

It is all a matter of time. Winnie is the one she was in the past and still is, while at present, she is also the other. She is also the other in relation to her marriage and her ambivalence: her rationalized happy days, her memories of happiness, and her torturous present.