Krapp's Last Tape

Krapp’s clownish way of eating the banana in the opening moments of Krapp’s Last Tape and the slapstick trope of slipping on the peel are jarring amid the play’s pessimistic messages about regret, lost love, and aging. In fact, this silly slapstick is a signature feature of Beckett’s plays, which generally center on serious existentialist ideas. The banana is a comical, absurd prop. Krapp eats one and starts on a second before any dialogue is spoken. Thus, the idea of meaninglessness serves as a preface to everything that comes after.

Krapp slips on the peel of the first banana, which he has carelessly dropped under his feet, symbolizing his self-destructive nature. His slip implies that the things he thinks he has discarded, such as his need for relationships with others, continue to bother him. He denies his true emotions and problems, suppressing them with alcohol and denial rather than confronting them in an honest manner. Characteristically, he merely pushes the peel off the stage to get rid of it.

The banana is also a symbol of his compulsive nature and low degree of self-control. Bananas are generally bad for Krapp. Not only does the peel nearly make him fall, but the banana also exacerbates his constipation. As a thirty-nine-year old, he says, “Have just eaten I regret to say three bananas and only with difficulty refrained from a fourth. Fatal things for a man in my condition” (5). Though they are deadly, Krapp cannot stop. In this way, his longtime banana habit represents Krapp’s death drive, the human impulse for self-destruction first theorized by Sigmund Freud.

The banana, which Krapp “strokes” before putting in his mouth, also conjures the sexuality he has repressed in an attempt to focus better on his work (4). The auto-eroticism of the action also represents the lonely life he leads and his masturbatory obsession with his own repetitive thoughts.

Krapp often fixates on his memories of women’s eyes. They are for him a symbol of truth, beauty, and love, as well as a source of great regret. Bianca, whom he lived with in his twenties, had “incomparable” eyes (6). The nurse had eyes, Krapp remembers, like “chrysolite” (8). Lying with the woman in the punt boat, he looks deeply into her eyes, an action that represents the search for human bonding, which he gives up soon after this scene. In the future, he ruefully exclaims, “the eyes she had! […] Everything there, everything on this old muckball, all the light and dark and famine and feasting” (10). The woman’s eyes, or the lost opportunity for connection they represent, held the deep truths that Krapp—mistakenly, he now thinks—sought in solitary work.