Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts

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 show more 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. show less

Samuel Beckett is like the John Cage of literature; their work can be looked at as either absurdly intricate or blatantly daft, which as a result, causes a lot of contentions for the ostentatious critics and breezy consumers alike. I'm personally very much on the fence when it comes to minimalism in general; there's a point where I have to draw the line and say this is too much. Fortunately for Beckett, he falls comfortably on the side of brilliance for this work alone and deserves his leather armchair in Irish heaven amongst the likes of Joyce and Yeats.

Whoa. What did I just watch? (Is watching a play an equivalent to having "read" the play? Yes, yes, why not. Same as listening to an audiobook in my way of thinking.)

Definitely a re-read (re-watch) candidate. Absolutely entertaining and even haunting, but I haven't a clue what it was about. Kind of like having a vivid dream and waking so certain of all the feelings and crave to pin down the meaning. But when you start to talk about it, or write in journal about it, you must concede that part of the meaning is the letting go of conscious logic and it's not going to fully translate to daytime. But it doesn't change the fact that you loved that dream and it's part of you now.

The amazing thing about Waiting for Godot is that it has always engendered confusion, uncertainty and half-formed theories. It’s puzzling to most viewers and reviewers. So much so, you have to wonder why anyone likes it, since they don’t seem to be able to understand it. Yet far from an enigmatic muddle, Godot is crystal clear. It is an Irish vision of Purgatory/Limbo.

All the evidence points to it; no evidence contradicts it. It lets the whole story come together consistently and rationally. Two ragged fellows meet every morning and do nothing all day. Not that there is anything to do - the world is essentially flat, boundless, gray and barren, save for one derisory dead tree. There is no water, no food (save for a single old show more vegetable in the pocket of one of them - every day), no shelter, no objects of any kind. Not even a place to sit. Estragon is doomed to remember nothing except being beaten up the night before. Every night. Vladimir is cursed with an inkling of having been here and done this before, but can't quite nail it. Total frustration.

They consider suicide, but don't even have the means to do even that little. They are dead men already, so it is redundant. They cross paths with another pair, similarly cursed, and this happens every day with no one remembering the previous encounter. They are doomed to repeat this meaningless activity every day for eternity. And part of it is waiting for a man who they've never met and who never comes. He cancels on them every afternoon.

What fresh hell is this? to borrow from Ms. Parker. They are waiting for God(ot) to decide their eternal fates. And every day, God doesn’t show. It’s Limbo (since cancelled).

It is precisely the same Limbo envisioned by another great Irish author and playwright, Flann O'Brien, in his last novel - The Third Policeman. In it, the nameless "hero" awakens in a land much like the one he came from, but can't interact with. Instead, his wanderings continually take him to the police station, where the two constables tell him he'll have to wait for the third policeman, who never shows. The police talk endlessly about a bicycle parked there, and whether or not it has moved, is capable of moving, should move, has the will to move, didn't it just move? After 150 pages of this, our hero surmises this can't go on and must be a bad dream, because it's not as if he is dead, he says. And it hits you; yes, of course that’s it - he is dead. This is Purgatory. Doomed to endlessly repeat the same boring, pointless rounds all day every day, visiting a deep well of lockers where he can withdraw anything he wants or needs, but he cannot take any of it back up the elevator if it adds even a fraction of an ounce to the personal weight he came down with.

Nonsense. Frustration. Boredom. Futility. Pointlessness. Endlessness. Hopelessness. Agony. There is no climax, no love, no betrayal – the minimum requirements of drama. There’s just the same again. That is Beckett and O'Brien's vision of what awaits Irishmen. In other words, more of the same. Forever. That is as powerful as anything truly dramatic, and accounts for Godot’s undiminished popularity.

Waiting for Godot is, in more ways than one, timeless. show less

One can understand why the Irish critic Mercier quipped it’s a play in which “nothing happens, twice.” In Waiting for Godot Beckett is certainly not telling a conventional story, and while he includes small bits of humor, he’s really commenting on the human condition, and with a very existential view. Life is absurd, meaningless, repetitive, confusing, cruel, and isolated.

Some have equated Godot, who the characters Vladimir and Estragon wait unsuccessfully for throughout the play, to God, and I think there is some truth to that as Beckett references or alludes to religion in several places – but I think more generally, Godot symbolizes any higher meaning, anything that would give this brief, transient life a purpose. That show more could be God for some and something else for others, but regardless, for these two, that meaning never comes. They end the play having answered no questions or taken any direction, pondering suicide, and are frozen into inaction by waiting for Godot so much so that they simply stand there even after agreeing to go. Oops, was that a spoiler?

The play is full of contradictions, repetitiveness, and questions – and there is little wonder why theatergoers and critics at the time exited thinking, wow, I just saw a whole bunch of nothing. Even the brutality and cruelty to others is presented as matter of fact and subdued. Beckett is making a philosophical statement at a time when, post-WWII, existentialism was on the rise, that feeling of bewilderment at life and the world around us, in part a reaction to man’s inhumanity to man, in part due to continued modernism and the growing disbelief in a grandfatherly higher power in the sky.

I wouldn’t guess this would be a ‘date play’ unless you’re dating an intellectual or a philosophy major, and I suppose one’s enjoyment of the written form is going to vary wildly as well, but I found it timeless, and a great artistic representation of the philosophy.

Quotes:
“quaquaquaqua” :) show less

What a relief!

I had been under the impression that Waiting for Godot was a religious allegory, where Estragon and Vladimir represented the two thieves crucified with Jesus, or society in general; Lucky represented Jesus; Pozzo represented organized religion; and the whole thing was some tortured, surreal / comedic commentary on the pointlessness / necessity of faith. Gar, I thought, if I wanted earnest religious allegory I could just read Life of Pi again, borrrrrrring.

"It's never the same pus from one second to the next."

But then I read it, and it's not that at all. It turns out it's just about kinky gay BDSM relationships: Pozzo and Lucky kindle latent longings in Vladimir and Estragon that they try and fail to act on. You can pretty show more much just watch the Gimp scene from Pulp Fiction; it's exactly the same story. Whew! This is way sexier than I'd been led to believe.

"Perhaps he could dance first and think afterwards, if it isn't too much to ask of him."

This isn't really my scene, but I appreciate the exploration of it. To each his own!

"We are all born mad. Some remain so."

Recommended soundtrack: "One More Try," George Michael. show less

This is a strange story. I love the main characters, I love the interplay between them, and quite frankly, I love how essentially nothing happens.

It's a strangely claustrophobic story for me, and that is heightened with the revelations of the second day.

But really, it makes no damn sense. But that's okay.

Though, throughout the story, I couldn't help myself and I found myself continually looping back to a single thought: This story makes so much more sense if every single person in the story is righteously stoned out of their mind.

Give it a go, and tell me I'm wrong.