Existence and nothingness

Existence and nothingness are dramatized through Berenger the First’s struggle to remain present as death approaches. He clings to the evidence that he can still see, hear, breathe, and think, yet the play repeatedly sets this immediate insistence against time’s passage, eventual oblivion, and the disintegration of his familiar sense of self. The result is not a settled philosophical answer but a theatrical conflict: existence is asserted in words and gestures precisely when it can no longer be taken for granted.

Time, Memory, and Oblivion

Berenger the First imagines remembrance on a scale that overwhelms ordinary human history. He asks how long he will be remembered, then stretches the prospect across twenty thousand years and two hundred and fifty-five thousand million years, until no one remains to think of anyone. His fear is not only that people will forget him; he turns that future absence into a present catastrophe. Even the possible exhaustion of the earth or explosion of every universe does not alter the conclusion: what must end one day is, in his apprehension, already ending now. Cosmic duration offers no consolation, because an immense future still leads to a point at which memory and its subjects disappear.

The other voices give this dread a compressed temporal form. Queen Marguerite declares, “Everything is yesterday,” and Juliette extends the thought to the present itself: “Even “today” will be “yesterday.”” The Doctor makes the passage sound universal: “All things pass into the past.” Against Berenger the First’s anxious projection of distant eras, these brief statements treat loss as a process already operating in every moment. The present cannot remain untouched by the past; it becomes past as it is lived. The contrast sharpens the play’s central tension: the King wants a future in which his existence is remembered, while the language around him insists that time carries every present away.

Queen Marie counters this temporal collapse not with a promise of lasting fame but with a different account of time. She tells him there is no past or future, only a present that continues to the end, and urges him to be present. Berenger the First answers that he is present only in the past; she rejects that conclusion. Their exchange gives presence the form of an argument and a plea. The King experiences time as disappearance, while Queen Marie tries to hold him within the immediate moment. Neither formulation cancels the other: her reassurance makes presentness imaginable, but his fear shows how difficult it is to inhabit when death has become unavoidable.

The Will to Exist

The play makes the wish to continue vivid by comparing Berenger the First’s resistance to the struggle of even a small ant. Faced with death, the ant is suddenly alone, separated from its companions; its universe, too, flickers out. The comparison reduces the King’s predicament to a basic living impulse rather than a matter of rank. His conclusion is stark: dying feels unnatural because no one wants it, and he wants to exist. Juliette observes that this is all he knows: the desire to exist forever. Her response identifies both the force and the limit of his resistance. His demand is absolute, but it cannot make existence permanent.

That desire briefly gathers around the most immediate evidence available to him. Asking The Doctor whether the throes of death have begun, Berenger the First rejects the possibility and then feels relief when he decides they have not. He inventories his remaining capacities: the walls and furniture are visible, there is air to breathe, he can watch people watching him, and he can catch their voices. He repeats that he is alive and can think, see, and hear. A distant fanfare sounds, and he starts walking; the Guard announces that the King is walking and calls for his continued reign. The scene turns existence into something staged and sensed: breath, perception, movement, sound. The fanfare and proclamation briefly amplify these signs, but they do not establish that death has been defeated. What they certify is a moment of continued life.

The Present and the Self

Later, when Queen Marguerite asks whether there were once doors, a world, or a life, Berenger the First answers simply, “I am.” The short declaration differs from his earlier inventory of sensation: it asserts being without explaining or proving it. Yet the surrounding exchange makes that assertion fragile. Queen Marguerite tells him to keep still because moving tires him, and he obeys. The scene places the bare claim of existence beside physical limitation, so that the statement is forceful without becoming a guarantee of control.

Berenger the First then struggles to recall what surrounded him. He knows that he was part of a world and that the world was all about him, but cannot recover what else was there. His repeated “Me. Me. Me.” gives the narrowing of awareness a verbal shape: the remembered world contracts toward the self. Queen Marguerite challenges the idea that this accumulated “you” is the real self. Circling him, she describes attachments as cords and hands that hold him back, then acts out cutting them with invisible scissors. She compares the attachments to mistletoe on a bough and ivy on a wall: things growing upon something are not identical with what supports them. In the same image-rich passage, his bent shoulders and difficulty walking are attributed to a load and a ball and chain; she mimes removing the weight and throwing it toward the audience. Berenger the First tries to straighten up.

Dramatic Significance

These scenes make existence both intensely concrete and difficult to define. Breath, sight, hearing, movement, memory, and the declaration “I am” all serve as evidence of life, but each is vulnerable: perception may fail, the past may become inaccessible, and the body tires. Meanwhile, the repeated movement of the present into the past undermines the hope that being can be secured by remembrance. The play does not simply equate death with nothingness; it shows the King resisting that equation through his insistence on present experience, while also exposing how little permanence that insistence can promise.

The contrast between Queen Marie’s invitation to inhabit the present and Queen Marguerite’s effort to loosen the King’s accumulated attachments gives the concept two distinct dramatic forms. One tries to keep him with what is still happening; the other stages release from what has weighed upon him. Berenger the First’s own statements remain caught between these pressures: he wants existence forever, fears that he is already present only in the past, and finally asserts being in its barest form. The play leaves that assertion resonant but unresolved, making the struggle to say “I am” the human counterforce to the certainty that all things pass.