Waiting for Godot (1952)

A very clever and enjoyable meditation on the dullness and lack of affect in modern experience.

The characters exist, and that's about it, struggling at all turns to

Philosophically, the novel seems to play on Shakespeare's notion that 'all of life if a stage,' while reversing that axiom, essentially tackling The Meaning of Life (yes, in capital letters, damn you) thru the guise of 'This Stage is All of Life.'

They wait, they kid, they wait. Inaction, ineffectual and too defeated and confused to even hang themselves.

I read this directly after Bernhard's The Loser (a writer often compared to Beckett) and found that WAITING FOR GODOT deals with some of the same topics of disappointment, longing and anxiety in a much more clever and enjoyable way.

With some of Beckett's perplexing and hilarious lines, and by referencing the play's famous reliance on inaction, you can almost picture the playwright hiding behind the curtains with his middle finger raised to the audience.

This is how I would like to imagine God surveying His world. ( )

My thoughts: I know this is supposed to be "magical and beautiful" but the story is hard to get through. Not much happens...there is no real plot except two men standing around waiting on someone to show up. Biblical allusions run throughout the play, but in a negative way. The stage only contains a tree, alluding to the cross. There are comments about the two thieves on the cross and the impossibility of redemption. Godot never shows up....at least we don't think so. There is a little bit of a Groundhog Day theme in the second act.

While no real action happens, the play abounds with philosophical meaning and interpretations. Some have placed this in the Theater of the Absurd. The author uses a slapstick type of gallows humor. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

This is not my favorite play. It's depressing, hopeless. Read it if you want to study the ideas of existentialism or the Theater of the Absurd. But, otherwise.... ( )

Makes you think, but also makes you wish it was a much shorter play. ( )

I understand that this is considered a masterpiece, and I get it. Having said that, I can't see myself ever picking it up again. Been there, done that, moving on. ( )

This is a two act play of Samuel Beckett which opened in 1953 in France. The story involves two apparently homeless men waiting for---Godet--- which is never clear who or what is Godet. They wait on a stretch of road and much is played out in a wordplay from their own conciousness. It is poetry, dreamscapes and nonsense. It is expressionistic, minimalism, existentialism. It is an allegory. There are many interpretations of who and what Godet and the reader really is free to make their own interpretations of the play. ( )