Waiting for Godot

Introduction

Book’s Name: Waiting for Godot

Author: Samuel Beckett

Genre: Tragicomedy, Absurdist fiction

Original Language: French

Published: 1952

Waiting for Godot is an unconventional play by Samuel Beckett. It presents the conflicts between living by religious and spiritual beliefs. Living by an existential philosophy asserts the individual to discover the meaning of life. Through his personal experiences. Interpretations of this play have filled many critical volumes. 

It suffices to say Waiting for Godot concentrates on the themes of dependency, compassion, and ignorance. It also deals with impotence as well as exploitation and humiliation in human relationships. Beckett demonstrates these aspects of human life in the sparse laboratory of an almost empty stage with only four men.

Summary

Waiting for Godot is a landmark in modern drama. When it premiered in Paris, the audience was stunned. No one had ever seen or heard anything like this before. Some were puzzled, some disgusted while others were enthusiastic. The title Waiting for Godot describes the action exactly. Vladimir and Estragon, two educated but homeless unemployed men, have an appointment to meet Godot on a country road. 

We do not know anything about this Godot. Instead of meeting Godot, they encounter another bizarre couple of males: Pozzo, a tyrant, and his servant Lucky, whom he drags along a rope. The play consists of dialogues between each or both of these pairs. They joke to pass the time and have deep reflections on the problems of human existence. There is hardly any other action in the play. A boy appears at the end of each act to inform them of Godot’s continuing absence while Pozzo’s second entrance reveals him to have been blind.

 Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful 

“Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!” This phrase stunningly sums up the whole play. The play is devoid of any action or incident or any kind of development. Even the characters are unconventional along with the plot that has no beginning or end. Estragon and Vladimir address each other as Gogo and Didi. After the boy informs them of Godot’s absence they decide to leave and come back the next day. 

Yet they don’t move as the curtain falls. A similar scene happens in Act II. The strangeness and nothingness fascinate the readers as they hope for a situation or problem to happen. It seems the tramps live in a twilight state full of forgetfulness. They are incapable to live or end their life clinging to each other with dependence. They portray the act of waiting as an essential aspect of life. We as humans throughout our life are always waiting for something to happen.

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Characters background

There is a reason behind the lack of character background and the dramatic plot. Beckett in Waiting for Godot deals with a subject independent of plot or character since it is the same for everyone. The best, as well as the worst aspects of humanity, are dealt with and talked about in the play. Other elements such as triviality, success, and failure play their part too. Nothing happens twice in the play even when the characters love, diverge, live, die, and disappear. 

Godot never arrives and the characters’ hopes are never fulfilled. Their words do not lead to action. The paralyzing beauty of inaction in the play can be seen in real life when we believe, “ Monsieur Godot will not arrive, but will be here tomorrow.” The play with its funny and poetic dialogues reveals human companionship and stoicism. The play speaks about humans when they are at the most animal level. The lessons are as subtle as a piece of music reaching audiences’ hearts beyond the horizon.

Godot and Beckett

About the Godot figure, we could say everything and nothing. He makes an appearance only by mention yet he is the dramatic reason for the play itself. Waiting for the mysterious Godot is humankind waiting for redemption from an otherwise unbearable life. Beckett denied that Godot was God in Waiting for Godot, as the object of the characters’ ultimate hope for salvation. 

But he serves a similar function to God. Campus describes Absurdity in The Myth of Sisyphus that the “divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity”. Beckett is the most influential writer. He projects irrationalism, helplessness, and absurdity of life in dramatic forms. Rejecting realistic settings, logical reasoning, or a coherent evolving plot, Beckett plays us. 

What do I think about the play?

Beckett called his play a ‘tragicomedy’. It's a genre in which the work obeys in its concern with the need for humor when confronting an unconcerned ‘fate’ that revises through humanity and its anti-dramatic technique. Beckett gives artistic expression to the irrational state of unknowingness wherein we Exist. 

The tempo is a Caged Dynamic where the characters are caged in time but moving. It's imprisonment dynamic with long hanging pauses where nothing is to be done. The absence of everything and the presence of silence are beautifully crafted. He uses various biblical allusions, symbolism, parables, allegories, and articulations of classical myth. Everyone should read this play at least once in their lifetime. 

Bottom Line

The Irish critic Vivian Mercier in his The Uneventful Event in The Irish Times, February 1956 described Waiting for Godot as ‘a two-act absurdist-tragicomic piece in which “nothing happens twice”. Waiting for Godot has been performed all over the world; from California’s San Quentin Prison (1957) to war-torn Sarajevo (1993). 

Even the survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans had performed Waiting for Godot in 2007. Mary Bryden, the former President of Samuel Beckett Society, writes that Godot “seems set to continue evolving alongside us, for the unforeseeable future.”