That tape which has the last operation in the pantomime, of course, has the last word in the play. Krapp willingly stops talking in favor of listening, perhaps tired of his self-loathing tirade, more likely because it is simply too late for Krapp. Younger Krapp wonders if “perhaps [his] best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back” (318), and here the listening Krapp sits “motionless staring before him” (318). Older Krapp realizes he has wasted his life in an obsession with the past, “listening to an old year, passages at random” (314), but he cannot stop himself from indulging in the self-destructive “aurism” which has him listening to a version of himself he simultaneously longs for and reviles. All three Krapps have different functions; the young Krapp mocked by the Krapp on tape is Krapp in the early stages of his intellectualism, his knowledge still rudimentary, a “young whelp” (314). The Krapp on the tape is a later stage of the same phase, which constructs false parallels in overwrought language, comparing, for example, a woman’s eyes to “chrysolite” (315), which is itself a delightful false parallel. The word “chrysolite” comes from the Greek for “golden stone,” but the actual mineral chrysolite is a yellowed green color. Here we see a gap between the signifier “chrysolite” and its signified object; the sign deteriorates into oppositions, not unification, and this epitomizes the problem of thirty-nine-year-old Krapp’s form of ivory-tower intellectualism. The final Krapp willingly subjects himself to relive again and again the pompous foolishness of his past, and to that extent becomes the most pathetic incarnation of himself. All three Krapps are the true Krapp, none of them any less Krapp then the others. Rather, in fact, they are all just different pieces of Krapp, and the implications of that pun are not lost on a Beckettian audience. Krapp does not laugh at his youthful hypocrisy in claiming not to want his “best years…back” (318), because Krapp is past hope; he has learned absolutely nothing from the banana peel, and, as Nell asserts in Endgame, “nothing is funnier.”