continuity of the sea without and the ¤re within, is the vocal equivalent of
a world in which all the characters—Ada, Addie, Henry’s father, Bolton, Hol-
loway, and Henry himself—are revenants, ghostly presences. When Ada tells
Henry he “ought to see Holloway,” she adds, “he’s alive still, isn’t he?” (Embers
100). But alive at which of the many discrepant times presented in this play?
The Holloway we meet in Henry’s monologue is an old man who says to the
equally old Bolton, “for the love of God, Bolton, do you want to ¤nish me?”
(104). As for Henry himself, his living testimony exists, as it were, in absentia:
his self, as Charles Grivel puts it in the passage that gives me my epigraph,
lives without him.^18
At the same time—and this is the paradox—Embers is an exciting who-
dunit. Inevitably, the audience tries to construct the plot, doled out in dribs
and drabs of information. Why is Henry so obsessed with his father? How
did the father feel about Ada? What, if any, role did she play in his death?
What does Bolton want from Holloway, and why won’t Holloway give it to
him? And so on. Normally and conventionally, radio is the purveyor of mes-
sages: who killed whom and why? when and where did it happen? what are
the latest police ¤ndings? what does the coroner’s report say? But in Embers
there are no ¤ndings, no announcement, no “late bulletin.” Indeed, it is these
features of radio discourse that Beckett parodies: the radio audience’s de-
mand for fact is consistently undercut by verbal and phrasal repetition, by
unanchored visual image (e.g., red dressing gown, blue eye), and by rhetori-
cal and sonic excess.
So stylized is the play’s language, with its invocation of seemingly un-
related sounds and sights, that we all but miss the moment when disclosure
actually occurs, when the noise dies down for an instant, allowing a bit of
the “message” to come through. That moment occurs when Ada recounts her
visit to the house, where “None of them knew where you were. Your bed had
not been slept in.” Her speech is signi¤cantly framed by Henry’s “Drive on,
drive on! Why do people always stop in the middle of what they are saying?”
and “Keep on, keep on! [Imploringly.]” (102). When Ada stops, unable to re-
member any thing else, Henry has to ¤nish the story for her, a story that im-
perceptibly and inevitably modulates back into the Bolton narrative. And the
narrator repeats the words “Not a word, just the look, the old blue eye” (104).
But if there is “Not a word, just a look,” the radio narrative is over. “Every
syllable” is indeed “a second gained,” for if there is really no sound, the lis-
tener must assume that the receiver isn’t working, that there is either failure
in the particular channel of transmission or a mechanical failure that has
somehow turned off the set. On radio, in other words, the only way to simu-
late silence is via sound. And it is this characteristic of the medium Beckett
118 Chapter 6