Whereas A broods between activities, B constantly consults his watch compass or map. When B has folded his clothes neatly, he winds his watch and crawls back into his sack. The goad returns, pokes A twice, A crawls out "stops, broods, prays". The cycle is ready to start over again. The impression we are left with is that this cycle of arousal, activity and return to rest has been repeated many times before and will go on repeating itself as the characters slowly disintegrate only to be replaced by identical characters of A and B. The mere naming of the two characters "A" and "B" shows the lack of identity and importance they hold within the scale of the world and how their characters will exist time after time. Act Without Words II shows the progression of life towards death as as meaningless as the constant shifting positions of the sacks. The Theatre of the Absurd has a primary function to make man aware of its position in the universe, and Beckett depicts this to be futile. .
In Beckett's work Play the playwright persists with the mockery and demean of human existence. The three characters minimally identified as W1, W2 and M perform a tangled litany presenting the story of their love triangle. The monotone voices and the speed in which the dialogue is performed detract from the significance of the situation and Beckett trivialises the characters lives. Beckett laughs at the characters with the clownish hiccups, the pettiness of the insults "Seeing her now for the first time full length in the flesh I understood why he preferred me" and the absurdity of their aspirations "A little dinghy, on the river, I resting on my oars, they lolling on air-pillows in the stern sheets." He finds comedy in the characters distress by mocking the frivolity of their suffering. .
The characters are presented in three urns, only revealing the character from the neck upwards. The faces almost become part of the urns themselves therefore dehumanising the characters of W1, W2 and M.
