"Waiting for Godot" by S. Beckett

Waiting for Godot is the best example of the play belonged to the theatre of the Absurd and the major work written by Samuel Beckett.

It talks about two French tramps, Vladimir and Estragon (or Gogo), who spend their days waiting for a mysterious Mr Godot who is expected to come and save them from their miserable condition.

The play is structured into two acts:

• Act I : Vladimir and Estragon meet another couple of characters. Pozzo is a rich middle-aged man and the master of Lucky, his poor old servant. At Pozzo’s commands Lucky dances, then “thinks” for the entertainment of the two trumps.
• Act II : Pozzo and Lucky reappear, but they have changed. Pozzo has become blind and Lucky is dumb now. At the end of each day the hopes of Vladimir and Gogo are revived by the visit of a messenger, Boy, sent by Mr Godot, who invariably announces that “Mr Godot won’t come today, but surely tomorrow”.

They occasionaly talk about suicide as a solution, and try to commit suicide, but they fail for several, sometimes comic, reasons.

Then, Estragon suggests that they should leave the place but Vladimir says him that they cannot leave because they are “waiting for Godot”.

The play is characterized by absence of plot and circular structure in which the characters are confined in a static world and in a single place.

The impression of immobility in Beckett’s work is reinforced by his concept of time: there is no past (in sense of tradition) and future (no expectations), but rather a series of repetitions, all exactly alike an without any purpose.

A paradoxical effect is that characters are obsessed with the problem of time, as if they were “trapped in time” and forced to fill it with gestures and futil dialogues.

The play is pervaded by the French Existentialism’s vision of life: there is no meaning to life at all and devoid of any purpose, in a totally absurd and indifferent universe.

Godot is a particular character who has, according to some critics, a double meaning: Mr Godot represents the hope that gives a meaning to man’s life or something which save man from his despair and miserble condition.

But, at the same time, Mr Godot is a realization of Beckett’s pessimistic idea of life: this salvific event is apparently imminent, but it will never happen.

So the main characters of the play waste their existence in the opportunity to see Mr Godot, whose arrival is constantly delayed.

In the play dialogues become more and and more fragmented and broken, in grammar and meaning, until they collapse.

Beckett exposes the vacuity of ready-made phrases adopting absurd exchanges or linguistic stereotypes in language.

Finally, he emphasizes the inadequacy of words using non-verbal language, such as mime, silences, circus-like gags.