Good night

The conversation is interrupted by the (upper case and unpunctuated) call of the pub barman HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME. It is closing time, and the customers are being sent out on to the street, where they call goonight to each other.

The barman's ominous warning also suggests that time is running out for us to halt the moral and spiritual decline of western civilisation.

Millais, Ophelia

And so A Game of Chess ends, as it began, with an allusion to a suicidal female character in Shakespeare. In the final line, the colloquial goonight and ta ta are developed into a quotation from Hamlet: Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies... These are the last words of Ophelia before she takes her own life (a death by water), having been used and abused by the men she should have been able to trust. Do they foreshadow Lil's future?

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