Waiting for Godot

This exploration paper features the absurdity that can be seen in Samuel
Beckett's work Waiting for Godot (1952). Beckett raises various questions
in his plays, which are left unanswered. Thus, there is an overall ambiguity
in his works. Everything is redundant and going on in a cyclic manner.
Life is useless as an air pocket. Presence of individual and God is being
referred to and left upon the audience’s imagination to draw their own
conclusion. In this paper we also explore Beckett’s way of bringing
uncertainty of identity; self and other and the way his world of the absurd
is constructed in the play. All the critics of existentialist way of thinking
have proposed that person ought to recognize his own singularity and quit
looking towards a saviour or a heavenly ability to handle issues of men’s
hostility. This research paper will also explore the themes of memory,
waiting and hope. It is evident that the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ can be seen
here as the reflection of what seems to be the attitude representative of
modern time. In fact, Waiting for Godot is one of the most important play
of Samuel Beckett's of .This classic tragicomedy is known for its lack of
plot--"Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!" Two old
tramps beneath a single tree make jokes to pass the time and reflect on the
state of human existence while they wait for Godot--who never comes. A
classic play of the absurd.
Introduction
The Theatre of the Absurd is a term coined by Hungarian-born critic Martin Esslin, who made it the
title of his 1962 book on the subject. The term refers to a particular type of play which first became
popular during the 1950s and 1960s and which presented on stage the philosophy articulated by
French philosopher Albert Camus in his 1942 essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he defines the
human condition as basically meaningless. Camus argued that humanity had to resign itself to
recognise that a fully satisfying rational explanation of the universe was beyond human reach; in
that sense, the world must ultimately be seen as absurd. Esslin regarded the term “Theatre of the
Absurd” merely as a “device” by which he meant to bring attention to certain fundamental traits
discernible in the works of a wide range of playwrights. The playwrights loosely grouped under the
label of the absurd attempt to convey their sense of bewilderment, anxiety, and wonder in the face
of an inexplicable universe. According to Esslin, the five defining playwrights of the movement are
Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, and Harold Pinter, although these
writers were not always comfortable with the label and sometimes preferred to use terms such as
"AntiTheater" or "New Theater". Other playwrights associated with this type of theatre include Tom
Stoppard, Arthur Kopit, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Fernando Arrabal, Edward Albee, N.F. Simpson,
Boris Vian, Peter Weiss, Vaclav Havel, and Jean Tardieu.

Martin Esslin, in his The Theatre of the Absurd explains the distinction between conventional plays
and modern dramas by selected playwrights. He insists, “The Theatre of the Absurd, however, can
be seen as the reflection of what seems to be the attitude most genuinely representative of our own
time” (The Theatre of the Absurd, 22-23).

The play is set in a strange, unspecified time, and does not take place in the context of any
historical events, but many have seen the widespread suffering and disillusionment caused by World
War II in the background of the play's pessimistic, nihilistic conception of the world.

Waiting for Gadot was an exploration of a new form of drama which was categorized as the ‘theatre
of the absurd’ by Martin Esslin. Humankind in this view is left feeling hopeless, bewildered, and
anxious. The ideas that inform the plays also dictate their structure. Absurdist playwrights,
therefore, did away with most of the logical structures of traditional theatre. There is little dramatic
action as conventionally understood; however frantically the characters perform, their futile
predicament of waiting suggest serves to underscore the fact that nothing happens to change their
existence. Waiting for Godot is an unusual and notable play written by Irish Nobel Prize-winner
(1969) Samuel Beckett. He is probably the most well-known of the absurdist playwrights because
of his work Waiting for Godot. Beckett's plays seem to focus on the themes of the uselessness of
human action, and the failure of the human race to communicate.
Theme of Absurd
Waiting for Godot is a prime example of what has come to be known as the theater of the absurd.
The play is filled with nonsensical lines, wordplay, meaningless dialogue, and characters who
abruptly shift emotions and forget everything, ranging from their own identities to what happened
yesterday. All of this contributes to an absurdist humor throughout the play. However, this humor is
often uncomfortably mixed together with tragic or serious content to make a darker kind of
comedy. Estragon refers to "billions of others," who have been killed, and describes being beaten by
an anonymous "they." Lucky (whose ill-fitting name is itself darkly comic) is treated horribly and
physically abused on-stage. And Vladimir and Estragon talk nonchalantly and pleasantly about
suicide. All this has a discomforting effect on the audience, who is not sure how to react to this
absurd mixture of comedy and tragedy, seriousness and playfulness. In act one, Vladimir says, "one
daren't even laugh any more," and his comment could apply well to the audience of Beckett's play,
who don't know whether to laugh or to cringe at the events on-stage. The absurdity caused by the
seeming mismatch between characters' tones and the content of their speech can be seen as a
reaction to a world emptied of meaning and significance. If the world is meaningless, it makes no
sense to see it as comic or tragic, good or bad. Beckett thus presents an eerie play that sits uneasily
on the border between tragedy and comedy, in territory one can only call the absurd.

The tramps lack of knowledge about everything seems to be a metaphor for mankind’s lack of basic
understanding of the universe and life itself. The creation of the entire universe is a big question
mark, especially for those who do not want to believe Christianity’s religious theory that God
created the world in seven days. Modern science fills the role of religion by trying to find
reasonable answers for these questions, but the truth is that we know neither our creation nor end.
We are born, live, educate ourselves, get married, become old, get sick and finally we die. The path
of life cannot be accurately speculated and is completely unknown. Throughout the play we come
across hundreds of questions that have no answers, consequently paralleling our lives because we
never understand what, where and how life has brought us to the present moment.

The entire plot flows with the hope of this mysterious character’s “Godot’s” arrival. The
characteristics of Godot, based on what we hear from the boy who works for him, is only that Godot
does “nothing”, and that he has a “white beard”, demonstrates the image we have for God.
However, Godot’s mysteriousness makes the audience more and more curious and confused when
attempting to predict who Godot is.
The unknown and the uncertainties:

The author has made use of time in the play in such a way that Waiting for Godot is a story of ‘time’
written in the form of ‘absurd,’ set during two consecutive days. It seems to pass normally during
the period the characters are on the stage, with predictable milestones, such as the sunset and
moonrise, although the characters are sometimes confused about it. But the intervals between the
two acts and various events are wildly uncertain. The two main characters are tramps awaiting
Godot’s arrival. Nevertheless, Godot’s continual absence wastes time in the lives of the tramps by
making them living puppets in the world of the absurd, therefore they simply “Let it go to waste”
(Waiting for Godot, 52), instead of finding an appropriate way to spend it. When Vladimir and
Estragon return at the beginning of Act 2, the growth of leaves on the tree suggests a longer period
has passed than the one-day Vladimir claims it has been. Estragon and Pozzo retain little or no
memory of their encounter the "previous" day, and other changes have mysteriously occurred
"overnight.” The characters seem to be trapped by time, endlessly repeating essentially the same
day again and again. The author here denotes the concept of a past and future is an illusion, and yet
the play seems to be only set in the “present.” However, the present does not seem to have a fixed
beginning or end and the play seems to hold its audience in a kind of limbo. We cannot control time,
and the senselessness of time suggests that it is pointless to attempt to stop its passage.

According to Martin Esslin, Beckett may have used simple, unusual and uncommon scenery in his
works to emphasize the difference between his plays and conventional ones, which is another
reason that his works are categorized in the genre of the absurd (The Theatre of the Absurd, 21-22).
His stage manifests with the characterization of strangeness, unusualness, emptiness, and
untidiness, with characters who are “tramps, wanderers, and that all are lonely” (The Theatre of the
Absurd, 33). Instead of using the materialized, sophisticated environment he uses a dark, gloomy,
small, and empty stage in most of his plays including Footfalls, Rockaby, Come and Go, Play, Act
Without Words I and II. In Waiting for Godot, a space without identification of its background,
either materially or culturally, is created or applies to the world in general. This allows the audience
to focus on the dialogue itself rather than the scenery. The audience is presented with a desolate,
unfamiliar, and strange space where almost nothing exists. Nothing noticeably changes in the
appearance of the stage, except for few leaves growing on the tree in the second day of the second
act. The tree is the only object that exists in the middle of emptiness. Interestingly, the first
astonishing absurdist element, the tree, seems struggling to survive with the tramps, and functions
as everything that the tramps have except the clothing that they are wearing. Yet it seems the tree
means nothing for them since they take nothing from it to affect their current circumstances.
Conclusion
Waiting for Godot is often described as a play in which nothing happens, twice. The ‘action’ of the
second act mirrors and reprises what happens in the first: Vladimir and Estragon passing the time
waiting for the elusive Godot, Lucky and Pozzo turning up and then leaving, and the Boy arriving
with his message that Godot will not be coming that day. With this structure in mind, it is hardly
surprising that the play is often interpreted as a depiction of the pointless, uneventful, and repetitive
nature of modern life, which is often lived in anticipation of something which never materialises. It
is always just beyond the horizon, in the future, arriving ‘tomorrow’. As the title also indicates, the
central act of the play is waiting, and one of the most salient aspects of the play is that nothing
really seems to happen. All of this waiting for nothing, talking about nothing, and doing nothing
contributes to a pervasive atmosphere of nihilism in the play. Broadly defined, nihilism is a denial
of any significance or meaning in the world. Deriving from the Latin word for "nothing" (nihil), it is
a worldview centred around negation, claiming that there is no truth, morality, value, or—in an
extreme form—even reality. This seems to describe the world of the play, largely emptied out of
meaning, emotion, and substance, leading to characters who blather on endlessly in insignificant
conversation. Given the play's deep exploration of the absurd humour and feelings of alienation that
arise from this nihilistic understanding of the world, one could say that Waiting for Godot is, at its
core, about nothing.

Samuel Beckett ushered the way for other dramatists to contemplate on the vagueness of existence
and the uncertainty of man's identity in a world that seems to be controlled by an irrational power
and whose only logic evolves from "nothing to be done". In the Theatre of the Absurd, characters
are looking for meaning for their existence fruitlessly. Man is left with two choices; killing himself
or taking life as it is without trying to interpret its intriguing predicaments since such efforts are in
vain. Through his characters showing anxiety, restlessness, Beckett’s plays not only reflect the 20th
century spirit, but also, they touch on universal and stable conditions of human beings; thus, the
play ‘Waiting of Godot’ provide a realistic aspect of the life of modern men.
About the Author
Samuel Beckett grew up in Dublin and attended Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied French,
English, and Italian. After graduating, he taught in Paris, where he met fellow modernist Irish writer
James Joyce and worked on both critical and creative writings. He moved back to Ireland in 1930,
when he took up a job as a lecturer at Trinity College. He soon quit the job, though, in 1931, and
traveled around Europe, continuing to write. He moved to Paris in 1937, stayed there when World
War II began in 1939, and joined French Resistance forces when the Nazis occupied the country.
Meanwhile, he continued to write, including a trilogy of well-known novels (Molloy, Malone Dies,
and The Unnamable). But it was for his experimental plays that he would become best known,
especially Waiting for Godot, which premiered in Paris (in its original French) in 1953. This was
followed by more plays, including the equally experimental Endgame. Beckett's literary reputation
and acclaim steadily improved in the 1960s, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1969 (he gave away the prize money.) Beckett died in 1989 and was buried in Paris along with his
wife.

Samuel Beckett ushered the way for other dramatists to contemplate on the vagueness of existence
and the uncertainty of man's identity in a world that seems to be controlled by an irrational power
and whose only logic evolves from "nothing to be done". In the Theatre of the Absurd, characters
are looking for meaning for their existence fruitlessly. Man is left with two choices; killing himself
or taking life as it is without trying to interpret its intriguing predicaments since such efforts are in
vain. Through his characters showing anxiety, restlessness, Beckett’s plays not only reflect the 20th
century spirit, but also, they touch on universal and stable conditions of human beings; thus, the
play ‘Waiting of Godot’ provide a realistic aspect of the life of modern men.
Bibliography
1. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed by
Stephen Greenblatt and M. H. Abrams, 11th ed., Norton, 2018, pp. 751-807
2. 2. Graver, Lawrence. Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot. Cambridge University Press,
2004.
3. Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd, Penguin: London, 1965
4. [Link]. Modern Drama in Theory and Practice: Symbolism, Surrealism and the Absurd,
Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1983

Word Count:
2269
Contents
Topic Page

• Waiting for Godot

• About the Author

• Introduction

• Themes of Absurd

• Conclusion

• Bibliography
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