“Waiting for Godot is not about Godot or even about waiting. It is waiting”. - Discuss.

– Introduction:

Samuel Beckett:

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) was an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, poet and literary translator. He wrote in both English and French. Beckett’s work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human existence. He is considered one of the last modernist writers and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’.

Beckett was awarded the 1969 Noble Prize in Literature,

"For his writing, which in new forms

for the novel and drama- in the

destination of modern man

acquires its elevation?"

– Famous works of Samuel Beckett:

Novels:

1.    Murphy

2.    Watt

3.    The Unnamable

Plays:

1.    Waiting for Godot

2.    Endgame

3.    Happy Days

Collected Works:

1.    Collected Works

2.    Ends and Odds

– Waiting for Godot:

Beckett is most famous for his play Waiting for Godot. Like most of his works after 1947, the play was first written in French with the title ‘En Attempt Godot’. And is subtitled ‘A Tragicomedy in two acts’. It was voted “the most significant English language play of 20^th century”.

– A situation having a general human application:

The two key words in the little are ‘waiting’ and ‘Godot’. What Godot exactly means has been the subject of much controversy. It has been suggested that Godot is a weakened or fragile form of the word ‘God’. Godot may therefore suggest the intervention of a supernatural agency. Or perhaps Godot stands for a mythical human being whose arrival is expected to change the situation. Although Godot fails to appear in the play, he is as real a character as any of those whom we actually see. However, the subject of the play is not Godot; the subject is ‘waiting’, the act of waiting as an essential characteristics aspect of the human condition.

Throughout their lives, human beings always wait for something; and Godot simply represents the objective of their waiting- an event, a thing, a person, death. Beckett has thus depicted in this play a situation which has a general human application.

– The mood of vain expectancy:

Vladimir and Estragon have travelled far towards total nihilism, but they have not fully achieved it. They still remain enough remnants of hope to be tormented by despair. Their main preoccupation is to pass the time as well as they can until night comes and they can go. They are merely filling up the hours with pointless activity.

And if Godot comes, a new factor may be introduced into their existence, whereas if they leave they will certainly miss him. Their waiting therefore contains a certain element of hope, no matter how cynical they may be about it. This mood of expectancy has also a universal validity, because whenever we wait we are expectant even though we are almost certain that our waiting will not be rewarded.

– Waiting and the flow of time:

It is in the act of waiting that we experience the flow of time in its purest, most evident form. When we are active, we tend to forget the passage of time; but if we are waiting passively, we are confronted with the action of time itself. Being subject to the flux of time, human beings are, at no single moment identical with themselves.

When Pozzo and Lucky first appear, neither Vladimir nor Estragon seems to recognize them; Estragon even takes Pozzo for Godot. But after they have gone, Vladimir comments that they have changed since their last appearance. To wait means to experience the action of time, this is constant change. And yet, as nothing real ever happens, that change is in itself an illusion.

Still Vladimir and Estragon live in hope: they wait for Godot whose coming will bring the flow of time to stop. Godot represents to the two tramps, peace and rest from waiting.

– Themes of habit and the suffering of being:

Waiting for Godot is a dramatization of the themes of habit, boredom, and the suffering of being. Habit is a great deadener, says Vladimir and by the time he says so, he and Estragon have had about ninety minutes on the stage to prove it. It is the sound of their own voices that reassures the two tramps of their own existence of which they are not otherwise always certain because the evidence of their senses is so dubious.

– The pointlessness of existence:

The play is a fable about a kind of life that has no longer any point. This fable does not relate an action because the action it relates is life without action. This fable offers no story, because it describes man eliminated from and deprived of history. The tramps are waiting for nothing in particular. They have to remind each other of the very fact that they are waiting and of what they are waiting for. Thus, actually they are not waiting for anything.

It is meaningless to ask who or what the expected Godot is. Godot is nothing but the name for the fact that the life which goes on pointlessly is wrongly interpreted to mean waiting or as waiting for something. Their existence is pointless and they are incapable of recognizing the pointlessness of their existence.

– Conclusion:

The play itself is absurd because the play starts with nothing to be done and people wasting their time by waiting for something or someone. The question is also absurd.