In 1956, Beckett wrote the play All Those Who Fall, a radio play written for the BBC. Two elderly people, Mandy Rooney and her husband, the blind Dan, return home from the station. Along the way, they constantly stumble, fall, talk about trivial things, and always drag their weary steps. Clinging to each other, they try to find a small light of joy in the thought that their humble room, the fireplace with the fire, and the six pens to get through their day await them.

In Oh, the Beautiful Days, the protagonist is buried up to her waist – and as time passes, up to her neck – under a hill of cut grass, symbolizing death. Her optimism is not a virtue – it is an element that blinds her to the truth of her situation. The "last moment" is her only certainty, welcoming her with singing, like a poetic ritual of human grandeur. Nothing is more real than nothing. Man stands before a mirror, but the mirror does not reflect his face.

Is Beckett essentially tragic? Tragic because precisely in his works, he presents the universal Human being, depicted as a theoretical form and not as the person of a particular society or class, nor as the person defined by an ideology.

The Aristotelian definition exists here. Beckett denies to his characters and to his scene the external elements of tragedy. But there remains the very man, tragic, and the spectator will find within him, like through a mirror, his own face.

— Bernard Dort