whenever pause indicated.]” The “o” sound now modulates into the longer
unit “Who is beside me now?” and after the response “[Pause.] An old man,
blind and foolish. [Pause.] My father, back from the dead, to be with me.
[Pause.] As if he hadn’t died. [Pause.],” we hear the words, “No, he doesn’t
answer me.” “No,” which will soon become one of the key words in the Bol-
ton narrative “no, hangings,” “no light,” “no, standing,” “no sound”; and
then the variant “not a sound” (which will be Henry’s ¤nal words in the
play), is of course a reversal of the opening “On.” From “On” to “No”: this
is the trajectory of Henry’s speech, his Omega (note that both “Bolton” and
“Holloway” contain long “o’s” as well) in con®ict with the Alpha of his wife’s
name, “Ada,” and the diminutive of Ada in the child’s name “Addie.” The
narrator, Henry, for that matter, whose family name we never know, is caught
phonemically between Alpha and Omega, so to speak. When one hears Ada
speak lines like “Laugh, Henry do that for me” (97), the /e/ and /I/ phonemes
stand out as distinct from the other names.
But it is not quite accurate to say, as Pilling does, that Henry has “control”
over the voices in the play. For the dominant voice is not Henry’s but the voice
of the sea. It is that voice that punctuates each of Henry’s questions about
his father—“Can he hear me? [Pause.] Yes, he must hear me. [Pause.] To an-
swer me [Pause.] No, he doesn’t answer me [Pause.] Just be with me”—and
that is presented as a character in its own right in the following strange
speech:
That sound you hear is the sea. [Pause. Louder.] I say that sound you
hear is the sea, we are sitting on the strand. [Pause.] I mention it be-
cause the sound is so strange, so unlike the sound of the sea, that if
you didn’t see what it was you wouldn’t know what it was. [Pause.] (93)The “you” here can be taken to be the dead father, with whom Henry is sit-
ting on the strand. But if so, it makes little sense, since, as we soon learn, the
father lived at the sea’s edge all his life and presumably would know how
the sea sounds. Henry’s information thus functions ironically, or even meta-
linguistically: on the one hand, it shows the narrator having a brief moment
of power over the father, whose death haunts him; on the other, we can read
the speech as an aside to the audience, especially in connection with the next
sentence: “if you didn’t see what it was you wouldn’t know what it was”—an
absurd statement given that of course the radio audience cannot “see” the
“sea” (note the pun); nor can it, as Henry puts it a few lines further, “Listen
to the light.”
Such self-consciousness about the use of the medium and the constructed-
Acoustic Art in Beckett’s Radio Plays 107