'Endgame' begins with Clov announcing that it is 'Finished, it's finished'. It isn't. That can only be wishful thinking. If all were finished he would be dead. He isn't.

Skilful chess players, as Beckett was, perform set routines (termed the endgame) to achieve a predetermined desirable outcome. The predetermined outcome of life is death. Hamm would 'have done with losing' the old endgame but 'this … this … thing' (the unspeakable condition that is human existence), as Clov continually observes, is 'still taking its course'. So each in his turn (Clov at the start, Hamm later) is forced to accept that it is only 'nearly finished' or, rather, hope that 'it must be nearly finished'.

Clov's experience of living leaves him nostalgic for when they 'weren't in the land of the living,' rather than having to endure 'all life long the same inanities'. But, as Hamm reminds him, 'You're on earth, there's no cure for that!' Clov only deludes himself in assuming 'I can't be punished any more'. He can only dream of 'a world where all would be silent and still and each thing in its last place, under the last dust'.

They are used to playing this old endgame but would dearly love to have done with always losing. Committing suicide is no option, for that would be to thwart life from attaining its own end. So Hamm hesitates: 'It's time it ended and yet I hesitate to - [he yawns] - to end.' And though Clov feels desperately 'If I could kill him I'd die happy', he does admit to Hamm:

Clov: I couldn't finish you.
Hamm: Then you shan't finish me.

So Hamm is left only hoping, impossibly, 'Tomorrow I'll be gone for ever.'

At the end, Clov is left fearful of the fact that 'It'll never end, I'll never go' and resigns himself to the fate that, in going on waiting for his living to end, he 'must learn to suffer better'.