ness of the narrative is the “noise” Beckett introduces into the channel. We
are warned that the sea sound effects are not accurate and are exhorted to
“listen to the light.” The “story” is thus immediately established as unreal in
the sense of unveri¤able. If Embers were staged or televised, the seashore
setting would be so designated, whether more or less abstractly. But when
sound is our only guide and the narrator tells us that the sound we hear is
“unlike the sound of the sea,” we cannot be sure where we are. It follows that
we cannot be wholly involved in Henry’s private mental drama. The sea,
we are told a little bit further along, is the scene of his father’s probable sui-
cide, “the evening bathe you took once too often.” But the next sentence
tells us that “We never found your body, you know, that held up probate an
unconscionable time, they said there was nothing to prove you hadn’t run
away from us all and alive and well under a false name in the Argentine for
example, that grieved mother greatly. [Pause.]” (94). Indeed, Henry’s obses-
sion is not with the sea as such but only with its sound, which he cannot
escape, even when he tries to “drown it out” by telling himself endless stories.
“I often went to Switzerland to get away from the cursed thing,” he recalls,
“and never stopped all the time I was there” (94).
Ada cannot understand why Henry ¤nds the sea’s sound so oppressive.
“It’s only on the surface, you know,” she tells Henry, as if this would comfort
him. “Underneath all is as quiet as a grave. Not a sound. All day, all night,
not a sound. [Pause.]” And when Henry explains that he now walks around
with a gramophone so as to drown out the sea, Ada responds common-
sensically, “There is no sense in that. [Pause.] There is no sense in trying to
drown it” (101). Again, the ironies here are multiple. The silence of the sea
below the surface, “quiet as a grave,” cannot comfort Henry, who knows that
the sea is a grave—his father’s. And the use of gramophone or voice or rival
sounds to “drown it” has no chance against the sea’s own drowning power—
power brought home to the listener by every sea-sound-¤lled pause. Yet, as
Henry says, “It’s not so bad when you get out on it” (101). Again, an ambigu-
ous wish: it might not be so bad to “get out on it,” because one would no
longer be alive to feel the pain it evokes.
No sooner have the acoustics of water been established than Beckett in-
troduces its opposite, ¤re, and the outdoors gives way to the indoors, as
Henry tells the story—a story “never ¤nished... I never ¤nished any thing,
every thing always went on for ever”—of “an old fellow called Bolton.” It be-
gins as follows:
Bolton [Pause. Louder.] Bolton! [Pause.] There before the ¤re. [Pause.]
Before the ¤re with all the shutters... no, hangings, hangings, all the
hangings drawn and the light, no light, only the light of the ¤re, sitting108 Chapter 6