Something somewhat different from Beckett – though not completely different perhaps. The thing that struck me most about KLT was that, while the main character was still old, miserable and alone, he isn't sociopathically so. Or perhaps I should say that the older Krapp – the Krapp listening to tapes isn't. The younger Krapp was. Which makes me wonder if this isn't Beckett self-critiquing some of his earlier work.
What do I mean by "sociopathically"? Well, if you look at the old, miserable, alone characters in the first four short stories, it's pretty clear that they're all rather sociopathic. They want nothing to do with other people. They are generally narcissistic misanthropes.
The elder Krapp is not a narcissist – or maybe I should say he's no more a narcissist than any normal person who fits into society reasonably well. Krapp is also not a misanthrope. He doesn't despise people in general. In fact, the primary misery he struggles with is that he has spent his life working on his writing (Krapp refers to selling 16 copies of one of his books during the play) rather than committing to the woman he loved. (Of course the other irony there is that, if Krapp is happy to sell 16 copies of his book in a year, he obviously isn't particularly famous. This harmonizes well with Beckett's general disinterest in fame.)
In contrast, the younger Krapp – the Krapp who speaks on the tape – is incredibly self-absorbed, to the extent that he leaves Bianca, the woman he loves, because he isn't willing to give up some other thing he's pursuing, presumably his writing. The younger Krapp spends much of the tape talking about other events that happened in the preceding year – many of them trivial compared to Bianca. It's fairly clear he's trying to displace his focus and convince himself that Bianca was just another fling.
The elder Krapp believes he was an idiot to leave Bianca. Perhaps he came to that conclusion some time ago and is reminded of it when he pulls the tape from 30 years prior to listen before recording the tape for year 69. He wishes he could go back to then and be with Bianca again, and does so in memory.
At one level, Beckett seems to be critiquing his earlier writing. The elder Krapp calls the 39-year-old Krapp on the tape "that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago." He bashes the idiocy of his youth. At the time Beckett wrote the short stories, "First Love," "The Expelled," "The Calmative," and "The End," all of which focus on self-absorbed misanthropes, possibly in reaction to his experiences during World War II – at that time, he was 39 or 40. KLT was written twelve years later and projecting eighteen years into the future (hence "A late evening in the future," perhaps?). Beckett already saw the nature of his earlier characters – and perhaps his earlier self – and uses Krapp to describe them – self-absorbed, pompous, annoying.
But perhaps there's another issue in play. Beckett had been in a long-running relationship with Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil (about twenty years at the time of KLT). Three years after KLT, Beckett married her, though all accounts suggest he was more concerned with inheritance law than affection, bonding, and so forth. Since he never left her, presumably they were emotionally and psychologically married well before the ceremony, making it truly a formality. Perhaps KLT is Beckett struggling with the question of marriage. If he doesn't marry her, he is effectively leaving her (at least financially), as Krapp left Bianca. Perhaps he is struggling with the idea, something that is contrary to his philosophy and ideals.
In the end, Krapp, unlike most of Beckett's characters is at once likable, or at least pitiable. Krapp is also more concrete than many Beckett characters, for all the brevity of the text we have about him. This makes KLT a bit of an odd bird in Beckett's menagerie, but it's a good oddness.
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