Lakhasly

The Old Man and Old Woman are stuck in a repetitive existence, retelling the same story and performing the same imitations day after day--even the water around their island is stagnant.

The Old Man and Old Woman are stuck in a repetitive existence, retelling the same story and performing the same imitations day after day—even the water around their island is stagnant. The man can hardly even advance his story, rarely getting past "Then at last we arrived," which is itself a conflation of an ending and a beginning that circles around itself. In fact, they are not entirely sure what does come next. When the man resumes the story, after having remembered they were in Paris, he says "at the end of the end of the city of Paris, there was, there was, was what?" He keeps pushing to "the end of the end," but the end of the road is shrouded in mystery. But perhaps a previous comment the man has made sheds some light. Giving an explanation for why the sky gets darker earlier now, he says "the further one goes, the deeper one sinks. It's because the earth keeps turning around, around, around, around…" The revolutions—of earth and of a repetitive existence—grind the couple into deathly routines, cyclical actions that inch them closer to death as they seek ways to create some excitement in their lives. The man, especially, is such a prisoner of this repetition that he is at times infantile, belying his ninety-five years, and calls his wife his mother, and father, at one point. His confusion over beginnings and endings—whether he is a child or old man—and finds some roots in his story, which is about being cast out of a garden. The reference is to the Garden of Eden, and since he cannot remember mankind's initiation into the real world and expulsion from a godly one, it helps explain his confusion over lesser beginnings and endings.

In this never-ending present-tense cycle, the man and woman both try to access a past that is now beyond reach. The woman even takes a dose of salt each night, she says, to erase her memory of her husband's story, while the man expresses his distaste for history. More than that, they both regret the course their lives have taken. She continually reminds her husband that he could have had a better occupation had he been more ambitious, a notion he derides, as he is already the "general factotum" of their house. While the woman flirts with the Photo-engraver, the man has a deeper attachment to Belle, waxing poetic about their lost chance at romance. When he says, "I loved you, I love you," it is clear he has not given up on her and wishes he could change his past. Much like the tramps in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and the old couple in Beckett's Happy Days, the couple in The Chairs is trapped in a repetitive prison with their best days either behind them or completely forgotten.