CHAPTER III

WAITING FOR GODOT

CHAPTER III

WAITING FOR GODOT

It is hard not to ask yourself what life is all about and whether there is

any sense to it or whether it's all a tragic blunder of fate.

- The Razor's Edge, W.S. Maugham

When Waiting for Godot become famous in the mid-fifties, the non-personai or

puppet-like abstraction of the paired character made a particularly strong impact.

This was so partly because various types of naturalistic and realistic drama (from Ibsen to

Sartre, Miller and others) had accustomed readers and audiences to think of characters as

fleshed out, round and motivated and changing like a person known in the actual world

with whom we could identity sympathetically or other wise. This concept of character,

though relatively naive, is clear-cut and in many respects natural, and it was certainly

widely shared by the reading public and the audiences of the fifties, who were often

unfamiliar with the naturalistic drama: Greek tragedy, the medieval mystery and morality

plays as well as modem symbolist drama (Strindberg, The Ghost Sonata and A Dream

Play and Yeats) and the epic theatre of Brecht. At the same time, the popular theatre - the

old melodrama and farce, the music hall and the circus - were hardly considered serious.

So strong was the naturalistic concept of character that the stage figures of Waiting for Godot

tended to be regarded as mere puppets or else as elaborate symbols of split states of mind

or as archetypes of measureless significance. What the ordinary theatre-going public

lacked in immediate grasp, some of the critics compensated for, by endlessly speculating

about the origins and philosophical implications of Estragon and Vladimir, Pozzo and

Lucky. Their very name is supremely well chosen for the unfortunate thinker/artist.

Estragons, Vladimir, Pozzo, Lucky (French, Russian, Italian and English names respectively)

make up something like a European cross-section.

Regarded as one of the most controversial and seminal works of twentieth-century

drama, Waiting for Godot is noted for its minimal approach to dramatic form; it’s

powerful imagery and its concise, fragmented dialogue. Beckett’s portrayal of a world of

insignificance and incomprehensibility has lead many critics to identify Waiting for

Godot with existentialism, a post-World-War II intellectual movement based upon the

inadequacy of reason to explain human existence, as well as the Theater of the Absurd, a

post-World War II trend in drama characterized by experimental techniques and nihilism.

Most traditional plays begin with some action or event that results in dramatic

conflict; Waiting for Godot begins with no precipitative movement, only an abstract

struggle involving the passage of time. Vladimir and Estragon, two vagrants known to

one another by nicknames Didi and Gogo, wait on a desolate plain by a gnarled tree to

keep an appointment with someone called Godot. Dressed in the rags and bowler hats

common to vaudeville or music hall comedy, the tramps play games to pass the time and

discuss on such subjects as Christianity, the monotonous process of waiting and the

possibility of escaping their situation by committing suicide. The pair is generally

regarded as opposite components of the dualistic split between body and mind as posited

by French seventeenth-century philosopher Rene Descartes, with Vladimir functioning as

intellect and Estragon as the physical half. The tramps soon encounter Pozzo, a

determined man who drives his withered and debased slave Lucky forward with a whip.

To impress Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo compels Lucky to deliver an unintelligible but

terrifying speech comprised of political, scholarly and scientific jargon. Unable to silence

him, Pozzo and the vagrants attack Lucky, finally quieting him by removing his hat.

Pozzo and Lucky depart, and the first act concludes as a messenger informs Vladimir and

Estragon that Godot will not arrive today, but probably tomorrow.

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The second act, the latter half of Waiting for Godot is essentially a recapitulation

of the first. The action seems to take place the following evening, but the twisted tree has

sported leaves, possibly indicating a change of seasons. The characters seem largely

unaware that they are repeating their previous action, an amnesia that some critics

interpret as reflection of a stagnant process of waiting. Central to Waiting for Godot is the

irony that each moment the tramps spend waiting for the future brings them a moment

closer to death. Like Lear and his fool in Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear, Pozzo and

Lucky return in the second act transformed by time: Pozzo is blind and Lucky is mute.

The play’s theme of morality is summed up in Pozzo’s famous lament:

Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time? ...

One day ... like any other day he went dumb, one day I went blind,

one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were bom, one day we’ll die ...

they give birth astride a grave, the light gleams an instant, then its

night once more.

Vladimir and Estragon are again informed that Godot will not arrive today, but

probably tomorrow. The play concludes as it began, with the two tramps waiting for

Godot. This endless waiting served as a basis for interpreting the play. Existentialists

claimed that Godot shows man lost in a world after the death of God; Marxists

interpreted it as the alienation of a late capitalist society, coupled with the hysteria in the

cold war, where man ceases to be a political animal, Freudians saw in Gogo, the Id and in

Didi, the ego; Christians saw it as a parable on man’s need for salvation.

Andrew. K. Kennedy in his article on Samuel Beckett Action in non-action

(Cambridge University Press) catalogues the following opinions on the play taken from

the first fifteen years of the plays reception:

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“The artistic portrayal of man’s absurd existence as it appears to

Beckett” (Rechstein 1969)

“An existentialist play (arguing) against the assumption of an

image that drains off the energy of stark human responsibility”

(Hoffmann 1962)

“A profoundly anti-Christian play”(C. Chadwick)

“A Christian play” (Ronald Gray 1957, among others)

“An atheist existentialist play” (Times Literary Supplement,

13 April 1956)

“A modem morality play on permanent Christian themes”

(G .S. Fraser, Times Literary Supplement, 10 Feb 1956)

“A picture of unrelieved blackness” (G. E. Wellwarth, 1961)

“A modem classic affirming man’s dignity and ultimate salvation”

(L. J. Marinello, 1963)

Beckett described Waiting for Godot, as a play striving to avoid definition.

Some kind of “principle of uncertainty” is built into the fabric of the play at every level; all is

implicit. The act of waiting as dramatized in this play is not the kind that would normally pass for

goal-oriented activity in a western culture imbued with classical humanists, socialist and

increasingly, technological goals. It is possible to stress the “for” in the “waiting for,” to see the

purpose of action in the two men with a mission, not to be deflected from their compulsive task. In

that light the tramps acquire some of the characteristics of the quest hero, parodied yet still striving

after something infinite. They may be deluded, but they connect with certain literary figures (Don

Quixote? The Young Robinson Crusoe?) and general human experience. Eric Bentley in his article

The Talent of Beckett in The New Republic quotes some of the criticisms of the period. John

Chapman’s criticism in The Daily News is one of the big ideas of the century:

Thinking is a simple, elementary process. Godot is merely a stunt...

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Another is that of Robert Coleman in The Daily Mirror:

The Author was once secretary to the master of obfuscation, James

Joyce. Beckett appears to have absorbed some of his employer’s

ability to make the simple complex....

The rhythm of an artist (Bert Lahr) [The actor who plays Estragon] was an eye to god’s

own truth:

All of them, I think, are the rhythms of musical comedy, or revue,

of tanbark entertainment and they suggest that Mr. Lahr has, all

along in his own lowbrow career, been in touch with what goes on

in the minds and hearts of the folk out front. I wish that

Mr. Beckett were as intimately in touch with the texture of things.

Walter Kerr, Herald Tribune

Bentley takes that Beckett belongs to that extensive group of modem writers who

have had a religious upbringing, retain religious impulses and longings, but have lost all

religious beliefs. Bentley differentiates Beckett from Sartre, in that he does not write

from the standpoint of atheism but ideologically speaking from that of skepticism and

that Beckett ever has kept the door open for critics with diametrically opposite views.

Beckett has once said, “I didn’t choose to write a play. It just happened that way”.

Other things have happened since the plays stormy Paris debut in 1953, include a ban

against any stories of advertising the show in Spain; near cancellation in the Netherlands

averted by the furious resistance of the cast: successful runs in almost every important

city in Europe. And on sophisticated Broadway, where it arrived in 1956, it created one

of the most extraordinary phenomena in American show Business. For, after the final

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curtain on many nights, the audience remained and, joined by interested literary figures

and layman debated the plays meaning and merit. In these debates clergymen were

sometimes pitted against each other on whether Godot was religious or atheistic.

Godot has been much easier to blame or praise than to explain. One difficulty for

its dependents is that the play’s Irish bom author, who created the work in French, has

not helped them in the few comments he has made about Godot. When a publisher wrote

to him asking for explanation of the play’s symbols, he replied: “As far as I know, there

are none. Of course, I am open to correction”. When Sir. Ralph Richardson, the British

star, asked him if Godot represented God, Beckett had replied, “ If by Godot I had meant

God, I would have said God, Not Godot”.

Bert Lahr, who was in the original Broadway production as Estragon.... originally

did not know what the play meant. He has come out with some unusual interpretation:

It has complex and has many analysis. But mine is as good as the

rest. The two men are practically one-one is the animal side, the

other is the mental. I was the animal. So far as Pozzo and Lucky

[master and slave] are concerned, we have to remember that

Beckett was a disciple of Joyce and that Joyce hated England.

Beckett meant Pozzo to be England and Lucky to be Ireland.

Mayerberg, who first dismissed it as impossible to produce brought it to Broadway

after six months. Preceding its opening on April 8, 1956 was an advertisement which

read: “this is a play for the thoughtful and discriminating theatre goer. ... I respectfully

suggest that those who come to the theatre for casual entertainment do not buy a ticket to

this attraction”.

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Raymond William’s, Hope Deferred in (New Statesman) considers Waiting for Godot

as a morality, but characteristically of uncertainty rather than faith, its basic themes have

very simple Christian origin, in two texts, which are incorporated into the dramatic

speech and imagery. First, “hope deferred maketh the heart sick, but when the desire

cometh, it is a tree of life”. Second, “for they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be

borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves will not move them with

one of their fingers.... Ye fools and blind! For whether is greater, the gift, or the altar that

sanctified the gift?” (Mathew). To the medieval moralist, the dramatic structure would

follow from the fact that the opposition of good and evil could be resolved. To Beckett,

evil, though destructive, is strong; while good, though perhaps redeeming is weak and

broken down. Beckett seems not to know the triumph of either but the deadlock between

each and within each. William suggests that the form of the action is that of a pilgrimage

and appointment: neither finally fails, but equally neither can be shown to succeed.

The parable of stasis of Estragon and Vladimir with a promise to go through the

future unaltered, is a dry reminder of as absolute a depreciation of human existence as

any artist has had the genius to sustain. The despairing conclusions almost became a

philosophy of the middle class, a sort of solid bourgeois virtue in Europe and a ready-made

justification for the generation of more or less cultivated Americans to have little hope for

a personal salvation and none at all for a political one. Eliot’s wasteland at least allowed

one to remember a former beauty and purpose inherent in life, but with Beckett, the past,

present and future are all bracketed behind a negative sign and sighing for the golden age

is as out of order as the desire to build either a natural or a supernatural paradise. In this

play of contradictory hypotheses, the words swirl about, embracing all the nuances of

existence, making them add up to a Universal nullity. William concludes that the main

source of the energy in Writing for Godot is tension between the profound ontological

pessimism and the bright surface of vaudeville foolery.

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Hugh Kenner once remarked that Writing for Godot might have issued from

Beckett’s wartime experience in the French resistance. Members of the maquis (The military

branch of French underground formed after the fall of France in World War II) received

or failed to receive messages and spent most of their time hanging about. War may be

hell but much of it is ennui, the feeling of listless weariness resulting from boredom.

Beckett’s vision of man is that of a forlorn species in more or less advanced state

of decay and approaching final paralysis...Beckett is a poet and his imagination

transmutes reality into super reality, which has a universal meaning. His language is

always precise and with subtle rhythms which convey a wide range of human attributes.

It moves from the apparent incoherence of Lucky to violent shouts of Pozzo or the puns,

cliches and double meanings of tramps. It can both communicate and show the incapacity

to communicate or the threat of disintegration and by so doing it shows of course its

vitality, while the poet himself shows his artistry and mastery. Beckett’s words act as a

screen behind which lurk ignorance and incomprehension or as a noise to keep at bay the

fear of the dark and silence. Above all they suggest what logic and reason cannot express

as such, they are part of a truly symbolist poem in which language is not only a means of

describing and making statements but is the very being of the poem.

Bentley in his article The Talent of Samuel Beckett talks of the defect in the

English translation of the French title. In French, the title is En Attendant Godot, which

means, “While Waiting for Godot”. Thus the subject is not that of pure waiting. Estragon

and Vladimir do not only wait. Bentley suggests that in waiting they show ultimately,

human dignity. These two men have kept their appointment even if Godot has not.

Are they then morally superior to their Godot for whom they wait? ‘Certainly,’ may quite

be the right answer.

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In Waiting for Godot we are presented with an unsatisfactory situation, which

cannot be altered, when Estragon says. “Nothing to be done”, he is on the pint of giving

up the struggle to pull his boot off, but Vladimir’s answer comically widens the focus:

I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried

to put it from me, saying, Vladimir, be responsible, you haven’t yet

tried everything. And I resumed the struggle

Ronald Hayman Godot And After in his Theatre and Anti-Theatre: New Movements

Since Beckett argues that the premiss for the dramatic action is that action is useless.

The play provides a new answer to the question on the constitution of dramatic action. He

cites Tom Stoppard who has said that Waiting for Godot ‘redefined the minima of

theatrical validity’. When Saroyan saw the play, he said: “It will make it easier for me

and everyone else to write clearly in the theatre”. Beckett made it easier by showing how

to erect inaction into valid theatrical action. The act of ‘Waiting’ is itself a contradictory

combination of doing something and doing nothing.

Hayman in the same article argues that in the theatre it is easy to make an impact

by doing something that has never been done before. In 1896 when Alfred Jerry’s Ubu Roi

was premiered, the opening word ‘Merdre’ (Merde = confusion) was -despite the extra

“r” - enough to provoke fifteen minutes of pandemonium among the audience. Many of

the Dadaist performances at the cabaret Voltaire and many Expressionist dramas were

equally defiant of convention. Hayman avers that in spite of all this a play stands no

chance of staying in the repertoire unless its negative gestures are accompanied by

positive achievement. Beckett has taken a great deal away but has also given a great deal.

The critical writing provoked by this work is itself evidence of its power to intrigue, to

engage the imagination. With setting, plot and character almost at the point of vanishing,

the reality of the play is defined entirely by its dialogue, and since we are conditioned

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into the expectation that drama mirrors reality, the appearance of a dramatic argument in

a vacuum carries the implication that there is no reality except the reality created by

reasoning. Hayman calls Hegelian skepticism to his support. Hegel has written, ‘The mind

becomes perfect thought, annihilating the world in the multiple variety of its determinations,

and the negativity of self-conscious becomes real negativity”. Hayman thus argues that

Waiting for Godot, in this sense becomes the most skeptical play.

Hayman calls to his aid Jacques Vache, an eccentric who influenced the Surrealists

who had defined humor as ‘a sense of the theatrical and joyless uselessness of everything,

once you know’. Hayman thus argues that if Waiting for Godot is sad and funny at the

same time, part of the reason is that the functioning of the human consciousness is made

to seem not only intrinsically theatrical but also intrinsically comic.

Hayman further argues that in a sense, the play implies an annihilation of the

world. He refers to Bergson’s chapter on The Idea of Nothing in his Evolution Creatrice.

In it Henri Bergson has argued that if one closes his eyes, blocks his ears and suppresses

all the impressions that have been flooding in, one remains with an impression of oneself and

the present state of one’s body. If one tries to imagine the extinction of his consciousness,

another consciousness apparently comes into play, ‘because the first could disappear only

for the second and in presence of the second’. Hayman argues that one can imagine

annihilation only by erecting a viewpoint from which to look at it. Vladimir can watch

Estragon sleep, and he can ask himself whether he is dreaming but he cannot watch

himself sleeping, which is one reason for needing Estragon, or, better still, Godot, a

witness outside space and time.

At me too someone is looking, of me for someone is a saying, he is

sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.

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Hayman in the same article argues that the conversation Vladimir has with

himself or with Estragon proceeds like Hegelian dialectic. Hegel used the word

“Aufhebung” to denote the movement from thesis through antithesis to synthesis.

Aufhebung means both cancellation and preservation. But for him the significance of the

ambiguity was different, slung between religious images and agnostic assumptions.

References to the crucifixion are recurrent in the dialogue of Waiting for Godot, and

Estragon says that throughout his life he has compared himself to Christ. In The imitation

of Christ Thomas a' Kempis quotes Romans VI 8: “Learn now to die to the world that

thou may’st begin to live with Christ”. Hayman argues that the religious imagery in

Waiting for Godot has the effect of tantalizing the men who have no option but to die,

gradually, to the world, tormented by the notion of transcendence but without any means

of achieving it. The possibility of Godot’s coming is no more real than the possibility of

Vladimir and Estragon committing suicide. Hayman thus affirms that the self-consciously

literary cadences and the recurrent dissolution of character into comedian not only

undermine our willingness to suspend disbelief but mock us for having started with it.

John Fletcher in his letter ‘To the Reader” which prefaced The Faithful Shepherdess

gives a formal definition: “A tragic-comedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing

but in respect it wants death, which is enough to make it no comedy...’’This definition

points to the importance of endings. Classically, a tragedy ends sadly, a comedy happily;

a tragedy ends in death, a comedy in marriage. The tragic-comedy that Beaumont and

Fletcher wrote was ‘tragi’ along the way but ended as a comedy. “And with the years this

kind of tragic-comedy has been cultivated, with the greater emphasis placed on how

exactly to manipulate a happy ending from seemingly tragic situations, an emphasis

clearly recognizable in eighteenth-centaury sentimental comedy as well as in modem

James Bond melodrama. But this is not the tragicomedy that modem dramatists are

writing, nor do those modem writers who use the term take any cognizance of Plautus or

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Sidney or Fletcher. Ionesco says that in modem times “the comic is tragic, and ... the

tragedy of man is pure derision”. He claims that for him there is no “difference” between

“the comic and the tragic”. Friedrich Durrenmatt who labels his The Visit a tragicomedy,

believes that in our time the tragic comes out of the comic, that comedy, in fact, brings

forth the tragic” as a terrifying moment, as an abyss that opens suddenly. Times being

what they are”, a world without a center, essentially shapeless, must offer blurred terms

for the dramatization of that world. Then again, perhaps the incomprehensibility of our

modem world is the proper subject of tragedy. The effect of the performance of the play

is tragic. The play prods the ultimate questions: it evokes the secret cause; it forces us to

face the fact of mystery.

Per Nykrog, In the Ruins of the Past: Reading Beckett Intertexuallv, argues that

seclusion, which is nearer to the understanding of the mystery that surrounds human life,

has been the personal life-style of Beckett. Nykrog gives the following tidbit (1949) that

has fallen into the hungry bowl of critics, which explains the point of Beckett’s seclusion.

Beckett : The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act,

in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged o paint.

The act of him who, helpless, unable to act, in the event

paints, since he is obliged to paint.

Duthuit : Why is he obliged to paint?

Beckett : I didn’t know.

Duthuit : Why is he helpless to paint?

Beckett : Because there is nothing to paint and nothing to paint with.

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Waiting for Godot and Endgame are plays drained of character, plot and

meaningful dialogue, “a” seemingly impossible tour de force “of doing something with

nothing” When asked about the meaning of Godot, Beckett threw one enquirer off the

track by saying that it had to do with godillot, a military boot, and as early as 1956,

another investigator (Eric Bentley) traced the name and even the title of the play, back to

Balzac’s comedy Mercadet, on le faiseur (1848) about a wheeler-dealer business man

who is deep in debt because his partner, Godeau, has absconded with the better part of

their liquid assets.

Chiari in his Landmarks of Contemporary Drama in Drama in France calls

Waiting for Godot, a poem for reasons very different from those generally invoked when

the word ‘poetry’ is used in connection with certain contemporary dramatists. The first

one is that its reality must be experienced as a whole, because the play attempts to mirror

the wholeness of life. Chiari avers that it is a poem and it is essentially a symbolist poem,

in the direct line of Maeterlinck’s drama. The action only progresses in the sense that

there are two acts, which require a certain amount of sequential time for performance, but

there is in fact no dramatic progression or tension. The action is static, confined to

waiting for something, which is never clearly defined. Chiari argues that ‘Waiting’ is a

condition of human kind and those who wait use words as in Maeterlinck’s plays, not to

construct or defeat arguments but to keep their anguish at bay and to give meaning and

creativeness to silence.

The play takes place during two evenings which seem at one point to be two

different seasons, since in the second evening, a tree, by which the action takes place,

bears leaves, be a symbolic sign of the hope which makes it possible for the two tramps

to go on waiting. Chiari avers that the tree is also the solitary tree of the Noh plays

(The classical drama of Japan traditionally classic or noble in theme requiring masks and

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elaborate costume, stylized gesture, music and dancing). Life measured by standards

of eternity is one day; “One day we are bom, one day we die, we live astride a grave”.

All things are the same since they lack their real meaning and this is the reason for which

the two tramps are waiting. Didi and Gogo...are meaningless, and Chiari argues that the

human life is a tale told by an idiot and that all this is due not to inherent absurdity, but to

an absence of meaning which the human reason seeks to understand. The tramps are

complex creatures with various levels of meaning which range from the particular to the

universal. At one level, they are well defined, Chaplinesque figures done down by life

and carrying clear-cut naturalistic attributes which they share with that category of

tramps. At the other level, they are no ordinary tramps; they are on the contrary, two

extremely singular tramps since they stand for something more than their own appearance in

that they are the bearers of the most important aspects of the self-consciousness of man.

Their language loaded with meaning, suggestiveness and ambiguities, is both a

poetic and a continuously dramatic language in the sense that it is never used for its own

sake but always in order to develop the dramatic situation in which they find themselves.

Their gestures, their clownish tricks, their hunger, fear, quarrels and bad faith are

practically referential and symbolic. Chiari further argues that the two tramps Vladimir

and Estragon are real in the way Alceste of Moliere is real and that they are recognizable

and highly singularized tramps, each one with his own habits, feelings and reaction.

They are also types, representing a whole aspect of human kind. They are real, they eat,

sleep, squabble, are slapped and beaten by others and they suffer and they are in a

situation, which situation is that of the human condition. They stand for human kind

aware of transcendence and waiting for a sign of its presence.

Chiari argues that whatever happens in Waiting for Godot is like the negative of a

film; it is something that can only exist if it is developed and brought to light by the

positive intervention of the photographer. In the play, action could only be made positive

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by the appearance of Godot whose absence fills the waiting and negates everything that

takes place in this atmosphere of waiting which is a vacuum. Chiari affirms that nothing

positive could take place in such an atmosphere, since no actions are dependent upon

waiting for Godot or for God whose absence causes the vacuum of waiting and negates

everything, including the tramp’s hunger, suffering and fears. Hunger and fear are real

enough and are experienced both physically and mentally, but as they take place in a

world from which all meanings have been absolutely sucked out by the absence for which

the tramps are waiting and longing, these phenomenal happenings, although real, have no

meaning. Chiari argues that they could only acquire meaning through the appearance of

Godot that is to say through a positive belief in God. Without Godot’s appearance or to

be precise, without his existence, life, instead of being as it is - bi-polarized between

Being and non-being, is merely non-being and meaningless. Life thus is rendered absurd,

‘although a very definite type of absurdity’. It is in this context, the absurdity of

non-being, that is to say something that can have no reality until the emergence of being.

Chiari thus concludes that it is only within Being that non-being can be posited, and in

the case of Waiting for Godot, the absurdity attached to it is not the absurdity of an

atheistic, incoherent world but the absurdity of the subjective judgment of those who,

refuse to accept the unavoidable margin of irrationality and mystery which necessarily

pertains to transcendence and which divides the finite from the infinite.

Chiari differentiates between the absurdity as represented in Beckett and in the

works of Ionesco. The absurdity of the atheist is objective absurdity that can only be

meaningless and devoid of any hope, since it is looked upon a pure contingence without

any informing substance, therefore without any hope of change. It is condemned to be

eternally what it is; it is like Sartre’s Hell. In it, men will always be what they are,

endlessly repeating the same meaningless, mechanical gestures which are like phantasmic

gestures without real existence, or like the limbo world of Nietzsche’s eternal cycle.

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This view of absurdity can be entertained as a dramatic device, or as a kind of

intellectual, protective shell, forbidding questioning and metaphysical anxiety makes it

intellectually untenable; for it turns a concept - that of absurdity - into an absolute. Chiari

argues that the concept of the absurd of Ionesco and Co and that of Beckett have nothing

in common, except the name. The world of Beckett is only absurd and meaningless

because of the absence of Godot. If Godot makes his appearance or if the belief that he

would come one day, though not in the immediate future, is firmly planted in the minds

of the two tramps, even their waiting would assume vast significance. On the other hand

the world of Ionesco is just plain incoherent, mechanical and riddled with fantasies and

nightmares, and lacking a center which is the self-awareness of absence.

Chiari further says that Beckett’s characters are only vaguely aware of their past

and that they live in a negativated present and have no future. The kernel of realism,

which transmuted by imagination, is the basis of the greatness of Godot, remains frozen,

fixed point in time. It offers a profoundly true picture of man, but it is man already

partially caught in spreading ice while the earth itself is being slowly covered by it; it is

therefore a terrifying picture of man under the looming threat of fossilization. Lear also

has to go through the barrenness, icy lands and night but he is always fully alive, with a

past, a present and finality, which give meaning to his death and to that of Cordelia.

The Shakespearian world is objective, true to reality as apprehended through imagination,

dynamic, coherent and part of a greater whole implying a finality and justice, which

preclude absurdity. Chiari argues that the world of Waiting for Godot could not be

described in such terms, as its reality, instead of being part of a whole, tends on the

contrary to be the whole. Within the context of absent transcendence the whole is reduced

to an image of nihilism and moving despair.

Godot, of course, is not specifically God, although his vague attributes could

qualify any powerful master. His behavior is unpredictable; he treats well the boy who

T463 f "Arb^>

minds the goats, and beats without reason the one who minds the sheep. He could bring

joy or tears and it is understandable why Estragon fears his arrival. Godot may come and when

he comes it may be for saving or dooming. The anxious waiting in the vacuum thus becomes

the parable of the human condition. Gogo’s answer to Didi’s query is very significant.

Didi : We are not saints; but we have kept our appointment. How many

people can boast as much?

Gogo : Billions.

Normand Berlin in his The Secret Cause: A Discussion of Tragedy. Boundary

Situation: King Lear and Waiting for Godot compares Waiting for Godot with

Shakespeare’s King Lear and Hamlet. Godot is hearkened in Waiting for Godot as often

capriciousness is emphasized (Why punish the sheep boy and not the goat boy?) and

fortuitousness (Pozzo’s handy dandy” statement that he could have been in Lucky’s shoes

and vice versa) and man’s essential helplessness and vulnerability. Also emphasized is

death, an important ingredient of tragedy and, for some, what Godot represents. Didi and

Gogo, situated between question and answer, between apparent meaninglessness and

possible meaning, between present and future, are frozen as well as on the boundary

between life and death. Beckett presents no specific emblem of death - as Shakespeare

does in his pictures of Hamlet holding the skull and Lear holding the dead Cordelia - but

the play dwells on mortality. Lucky’s speech, though unfinished, progressed “on” toward

the skull and the stones. Reference to the death of Jesus dots the play. Didi and Gogo

twice contemplate suicide. They talk about the “dead voices” that make noises “like

leaves”... “like ashes”... “like leaves”. Death haunts the two prominent passages.

Pozzo in Act II, now blind, bewildered, furiously shouts these words to Didi as he leaves

the stage:

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Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time!

It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for

you, one day he went dumb. One day I went blind, one day

we’ll go deaf, one day we were bom, one day we shall die, the

same day, the same second, is that not enough for you?

(Calmer). They give birth astride a grave, the light gleams an

instant, then it is night once more....On!

Berlin suggests that the “On!” could lead to one place only and that is to the

grave .The night of the play has come only to make Posso’s blindness more dark.

“Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole lingeringly, the gravedigger

puts on the forceps.” Vladimir comes to the realization of the human condition as Posso’s

words echo in his mind. The cries belong to the tormented man and to the newborn babe,

leaving grave-womb with the help of the gravedigger-doctor. The child cries at the first

moment air is sucked in and after that is forever filling the air with cries.

Nykrog sees the stage in Godot representing a road, the archetypal metaphor for a

movement, a development, a progress that of a pilgrim or rake, which takes someone

from one place. What is particular about the scenario in Godot is that the main character,

Vladimir and Estragon, Didi and Gogo, refuse to make use of the road according to its

purpose. They do not move along it; they stay where they are and where they seem to

have been for a longtime, totally idle and mortally bored, but stubborn, remaining in spite

of all the frustration and sufferings that make their existence by the roadside utterly

miserable. They wait for the ever-elusive Godot.

Nykrog juxtaposes the “Waiting” in Godot with the “Waiting” of the Virgins.

The parable of the virgins, in Mathew 25, is part of the last teaching of Christ given to his

disciples before the events of the Easter: the following chapter tells of the betrayal by

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Judas and the Last Supper. The scene is Jerusalem, the occasion, and a visit the group has made

to the temple. Three evangelists record Jesus’ words, but Mathew’s account is by far the most

detailed. It is a truly terrifying text, one of those that a believer who likes his comfort tends to

overlook. The theme is the return of the Son of Man - Doomsday. To the reader who comes to

this immensely important text from the text of Godot, with its numerous allusions to the

Gospel, a surprising number of details seem to correspond. Nykrog argues that it is as if Godot

had been elaborated with two chapters from Mathew fresh in mind: (105)

There will be “the abomination of desolation” - a comparison to

Godot throws great light on the subject

“For there shall arise false Christs and false prophets” - Pozzo may

be the anti - Christ or Godot?

The parable of the fig tree is perhaps what makes the tree in Waiting for Godot;

“When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh”.

The leaves that come out on the tree between the two acts of Godot, perhaps announce

the approach of spring.

“Thus shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left” - Godot’s

“it’s a reasonable percentage”. Nykrog avers that the discussion that follows fuse these

two texts.

“Watch, therefore: for ye know not what hour the lord doth come”, from Mathew

suggests the anguish that has become almost an obsession in Waiting for Godot.

In the parable of the talents which follows [the parable of the Virgins], the Lord is

seen as “an hard man, reaping where [He has] not sown, and gathering where [He has]

not strawed: which matches the total ruthlessness of “Godot” in general. This parable

leads up to Christ’s final fulmination:

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And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate

them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the

goats: and he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on

the left. ... And these shall go away to everlasting punishment: but

the righteous into life eternal.

Nykrog sees an inversion in Beckett’s Godot. Mr. Godot ill-treats the boy who

minds the sheep but not the boy who minds the goats. The disciples died without seeing

the cosmic events, in spite of the explicit promise that Christ had given in the course of

his teachings: “Verify I say unto you. This generation shall not pass, till all these things

be fulfilled”. And many are the moments in history when faithful Bible readers have

prepared themselves for the Second Coming - which has never materialized. Nykrog

suggests that Didi and Gogo in Beckett’s play are less ambitious; all they hope for is to

be taken in by a generous host who will feed them and keep them warm On the other

hand Pozzo who considers himself owner of the entire region takes Godot to be a vague

and hypothetical usurper.

Lucky’s philosophical lecture has a rudimentary logical backbone. Nykrog

removes the tangle of digressions, repetitions and “foot-note in the text” and pares down

the verbal profundity to this essential line:

Given the existence...of a personal God...who from the heights of

divine apathia...loves us dearly...

Considering... that man [in spite of progress] is shrinking and at the

same time is growing smaller....

And considering...that in the plains in the mountains by the

seas...the air is the same and...the earth...

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At this point the reasoning becomes totally unclear, contrasting rocks (the earth

abode of stones...the stones so blue, so calm) and skulls (“alas alas on on the skull the

skull the skull”). “The beginning has a familiar ring and so has the end. Lucky starts from

something not unlike the premises to Leibniz’s problem in the Theodicy and ends up

stating something that comes very close to Camus’s concept of the absurd. Leibniz raised

the problem of the presence of evil in a world created by a God who is almighty,

omniscient, and all good; Camus found that the world is obviously constructed in a way

that is incompatible with man’s basic demands for truth, justice and clarity. Leibniz

found that what we perceive as evil are the relatively minor side effects of causes that, on

the whole, generate more good than evil; Camus stated that the presence of man in the

world constitutes a situation of absurdity;” (106) Nykrog suggests that Lucky,

considering how man has been reduced lately, seemed to be on the brink of concluding

that God must have created the world not for the habitation of man but only for the rocks.

...the dead loss per head since the death of Bishop Berkeley being

to the tune of one inch four ounce per head...round figures stark

naked in.. .stockinged feet

The Eighteenth Centaury Enlightenment marked the end of the absolute

predominance of a transcendental God-centered understanding of the world. The process

had been on its way for a long time (led by those who refused to “Wait for Godot” but

chose to move along the road to progress) but not until the generations following after

Voltaire, Berkeley and Diderot did the new, liberated Man “Kill God” and took his world

out of the hands of God (The Revolution, Napoleon etc). Didi and Gogo in their Waiting

for Godot represent the age-old Christian hope and expectation: Pozzo and Lucky, by

contrast, represent (less obviously) what came out of progressive humanism and

Enlightenment.

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What we have in the couple Pozzo and Lucky is a hideous concretization of the

stage of relationship between master and slave. Nykrog refers to Hegel who analyzed

that relationship in his Phenomenology of Mind (1807), an analysis that was taken up and

reinterpreted with enthusiasm by Marx and later summarized in The Encyclopedia of

Philosophy. (Vol. III.)

The slave is forced to work, whereas the master can enjoy leisure

in the knowledge that the slave is reshaping the natural world to

provide the products of his labor for the master to consume.

Thus, the master’s leisure protects him from experience of the

negativity of nature, where’s the slave, in struggling with nature’s

recalcitrance, learns its secrets and puts his mind into it. The master,

in consuming, destroys; the slave, in working, creates. But the

master’s consumption depends on the slave’s work and is thus

impermanent, whereas the slave’s labor passes into things that

have a permanent existence. Hegel argued, too, that the slave’s

work is a consequence of his fear of the master, who can kill him.

Death is overcome by the works of civilization. (107)

Nykrog argues that Beckett’s setup is a caricature of this, a cruel mockery of Hegel’s

noble line of thought. The master still contemplates getting rid of the slave, preferably by

killing him; but if Lucky was once a creative mind (in the time of Voltaire and Berkeley?) he

has since been reduced to the state of a helpless, even mean, a beast: a proletarian.

John Russell Brown in his Beckett and the Art of the Nonplus argues that Waiting

for Godot is not about the relationship of its characters or the story of their lives. It does

not state any theme or argument. Brown calls it rather the presentation of how these

characters have been set in motion and speech by their author on ‘A country road’ with

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‘A tree’ at ‘Evening’ on two successive days. Thus, the action of the play is the action of

its author’s mind at a certain place and time in our present world, given certain dramatis

personae as postulates.

This dramaturgy holds attention by discrete disciplines, by the economy with

which each item of stage reality speaks for itself. Brown compares Beckett with Anton

Chekhov. In Chekhov’s The Cherry orchard presents its characters as its author’s mind

directs, and story and argument are only a small part of its appeal; and it, too, finishes

with silence. But, Firs, the character on stage, together with the visible reality in which he

is placed, is not sufficient to bring the play to a close. The audience is forced to think of other

realities as well - and the consequences of events for other lives and other times. (108)

Firs : [of Gaev] Gone off in his light overcoat (Sighs anxiously) I

should have seen to it...Oh, these youngsters (Mutters something

which cannot be understood). My life’s gone just as if I’d never

lived... (Lies down). I’ll lie down a bit. No strength left.

Nothing’s left. Nothing. Ugh, You nincompoop! (Lies

motionless). (A distant sound is heard, which seems to come

from the sky, the sound of a breaking string, slowly dying away,

Melancholy. It is followed by silence, broken only by the sound

of an axe striking a tree far away in the orchard. Curtain.)

The oddity and particularity of Chekhov’s language are in contrast to the

complete simplicity of Beckett’s conclusion to Waiting for Godot, where “trousers” is the

only word that is not a monosyllable that could be found in a child’s reading primer.

In Beckett’s play, action is constantly arrested in silence, and it is brought to a

close with unusual simplicity. So the reader or audience is left in possession of little more

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than what has happened at each moment in the play; no concluding summary or widening

vision is provided to put the experience into a further context. At the end there is no more

to say or do.

Brown points out that Beckett has used silence, because it is part of our lives, a

necessary element of any individual’s attempt to cope with an inner, uncertain self and

with the disorder and the (sometimes more frightening) order, which lie outside self.

Beckett had to force silence into the theatre. It is not a natural element in those public,

noisy, celebratory, holiday theatres, where the ‘players cannot keep counsel’ but must tell

all their author knows in torrents of words and eye-catching exploits. It also seems

foreign to those other theatres that delight their audiences with colorful, lively and

unlikely fantasies. But Beckett has shown that silence is also a part of the theatre’s

birthright as it is a part of our lives. Brown calls our attention to the fact that the

increased use of silence in our theatre is due in part to the influence of film and television

in which the camera can direct attention without the help of words. Beckett has controlled

silence by the simplest means. Beckett is like a painter who reduces his palette in order to

dwell on the quality of a single color, the play of light on the canvas, and even the

apparent difficulty with which the paint is handled. Words are not for him fixed or finite

in sound or effect. He turns them over and over, as they are repeated, so that they become

more polished, refined, opaque, varied or treacherous as the play proceeds. Words seem

to turn around and achieve either more or less than the speaker intended: the effect is

often to stop speech altogether. Geoffrey Strickland in his article, The Seriousness of

Samuel Beckett (Cambridge Quarterly) has pointed out that if Beckett is in any way a

serious artist, his art is, presumably, of the kind of which Eliot speaks in Tradition and

the Individual Talent, the art that “modifies” the “ideal order” formed by the ‘early

moments’ (110)

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Waiting for Godot is a play that leaves us asking many questions and that drops

what might seem like a number of hints as to their answer; especially during the

questioning of the little boy who comes on to bring a message from the unseen Godot

himself. Strickland avers that Waiting for Godot has a certain amount of common with

the novel by Robbe-Grillet that inaugurated the age of “le nouveau roman”, Les Gommes

that appeared in 1953, the year of the first performance of Godot. The most obvious

question, of course, was not Godot. Strickland suggests that the word ‘God’ could stand

for many different things. The crucial question is what do the tramps themselves believe

or imagine Godot to be? How does Vladimir, for instance, believe or imagine that Godot

has communicated to him to wait by the tree? Do they see him, as certain believers see

God, as the only being that can give meaning to their lives? Is he merely someone who

they hope might fill their stomachs and let them sleep on his straw? Are they waiting

above all because they have no particular reason for moving on? How much does it

matter to them, whether or not Godot appears? To answer these questions, we need to

know more about Vladimir and Estragon. Beckett originally thought of calling the play

just En attendant and brought in the notion of ‘Godot’ later. Strickland argues, “ a play

which was just about ‘waiting’ could obviously not be serious or even interesting....

Bringing in ‘Godot’ makes it a lot less pointless.... but it still leaves one wondering if it

is about anything that matters very much, even to the two main characters.” (Ill)

Harold Hobson ‘s Tomorrow in Casebook on Waiting for Godot says that the play

is strange and curious is its processes or thought, “it has a meaning and this meaning is

untrue.” (64) He adds that to attempt to put this meaning into a paragraph is like trying to

catch a Leviathan in a butterfly net. The waiting is the entire waiting of humanity, which

dawdles and drivels away its life, postponing action, eschewing enjoyment, waiting only

for some far-off divine event, the millennium, the Day of Judgment. Hobson does not fail

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to remark that humanity actually worries very little over the Day of Judgment. It is far too

busy hire-purchasing, television sets, popping into three-star restaurants, planting

vineyards and building helicopters.

Hobson holds that there is no need at all for a dramatist to philosophize rightly.

The dramatist can leave that to philosophers. Yet it is natural that plays written in so

unusual and baffling a convention should be felt to be in special need of an explanation

that, as it were, would uncover their hidden meaning and translate it into everyday

language. The source of this fallacy lies in the misconception that somehow these plays

must be reducible into the conventions of the normal theatre, with plots that can be

summarized in the form of a narrative. If only one could discover some hidden clue, it is

felt, these difficult plays could be forced to yield their secret and reveal the plot of the

conventional play that is hidden in them. Hobson declares that such attempts are doomed

to failure. Beckett’s plays lack plot even more completely than other works of the Theatre

of the absurd. Instead of a linear development, they present their author’s intuition of the

human condition by a method that is essentially polyphonic; they confront the audience

with an organized structure of statements and images that interpenetrate each other and

that must be apprehended in their totality, rather like the different themes in a symphony,

which gain meaning by their simultaneous interaction.

The Times Literary Supplement’s They Also Serve considered Waiting for Godot

a Christian morality play. Beckett is constantly underlining it for us in the incidental

symbolism and the dialogue. The first statement, as it were, of the theme, is about the

“two thieves” crucified at the same time as our Savior.

Vladimir : And yet... (pause)...how is it - this is not boring you

I hope - how is that of the four evangelists only one speaks

of a thief being saved? The four of them were there - or

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there-about, and only one speaks of a thief being saved.

(Pause) come on Gogo, return the ball, can’t you, once in

a way?

Estragon : (With Exaggerated enthusiasm) I find this really most

extraordinarily interesting.

The discussion goes on to suggest that both the thieves were damned. The effect

of the dialogue is to make us identify the glib Didi and the resentful and inarticulate Gogo

with the two thieves and to see in each of them, an overmastering concern with the

other’s salvation. There is also towards the end of the first act a discussion about whether

their human affection for each other may have stood in the way of that salvation.

Estragon : Wait (He moves away from Vladimir)

wouldn’t have been better off alone, each

(He crosses the stage and sits down on

weren’t made for the same road.

I wonder if we

one for himself.

the mound). We

Vladimir : (Without anger) - It’s not certain.

Estragon : No, nothing is certain.

The tree on the stage, though it is as willow, obviously stands both for the tree of

the knowledge of Good and Evil (and when it puts on green leaves, for the tree of life)

and for cross. When Didi and Gogo are frightened in the second act, the best thing they

can think of doing is to seek shelter under its base. But it gives no concealment, and it is

perhaps partly from God’s wrath that they are hiding; for it is also the tree of Judas on

which they are recurrently tempted to hang themselves.

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Waiting for Godot is a contrast to Everyman or The Pilgrim’s Progress for Didi

and Gogo do not complete their pilgrimage nor are we meant to be clear that they will

successfully complete it. The angel who appears to them at the end of the first act is an

ambiguous angel: the angel who keeps the goats and not the angel who keeps the sheep.

And Godot - one remembers that God chastises those whom he loves, while hardening

the hearts of impenitent sinners by allowing them a term of apparent impunity - does not

beat him but beats his brother who keeps the sheep. It seems that Didi and Gogo in the

end are to be among the goats. The boy who appears at the end of the second act looks

like the same boy, but is not, or at least does not recognize them. He may be, this time,

the angel who keeps the sheep. That Godot himself stands for an anthropomorphic image

of God is obvious. That is why Vladimir - if he had a blonde or a black beard he might

be more reassuringly man or devil - is so alarmed in the second act when he hears that

Godot, Ancient of Days, has a white beard.

Wolcott Gibbs, Enough Is Enough Is Enough, in The New Yorker, sees the play

in a different light. The stage, barren but for a few mortuary slabs of concrete and a single

blasted tree, gives the picture of the world tormented by bombs - as chilly and desolate as

some landscape on the moon. The couple of bums might be the survivors of some

ultimate explosion. They are tired and hungry and bands of savage strangers set upon

them at night and beat them up. The graveyard hilarity of the discourse hints at the idea

of infinite misery sustained with no dignity at all but only a kind of lunatic vulgarity.

The tramps naturally find Pozzo and Lucky interesting and Pozzo to demonstrate that his

debased creature can still think quite nicely, calls on him for a speech and he responds

with one beginning:

Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher

and Wattman of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard

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quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from heights of

divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with

some exceptions for reasons unknown.

This goes on for almost a hundred lines or more and at the conclusion everybody

closes in on the orator in an enthusiastic attempt to beat him to death. Lucky is the only

intellectual with a high degree of the faculty of reasoning. The others stop him because

his reason may stumble upon the final truth. He has already described the terrible

qualities of the Old Testament God. If allowed to continue his revelation may come as a

jolt to the other characters.

Gibbs argues that Gogo and Didi represent the great mass of men and the savior

who never comes for them is God. This deity is not only an eternal promise and an

eternal betrayal but also an eternal waster of time and imposer of senseless disciplines.

Pozzo and his slave, by this same simplification, are just wealth and his slave who have

been bought and destroyed by it. Wealth, it seems is also to be destroyed. Neither of

them, in any case, is particularly concerned with Godot, who is Karl Marx’s opium

reserved exclusively for the masses. Pozzo with the whip and the rope around the neck of

Lucky his slave, his wretch, the being at the mercy of his will, commands and abuses

Lucky like a cruel brain abusing its own body.

Pozzo becomes blind and Lucky is rendered dumb - we can hear his wisdom no

longer. Norman Mailer in his A public Notice on Waiting for Godot remarks that Lucky’s

speech is the one strangled cry of active meaning in the whole play, a desperate retching

pell-mell of broken thoughts and intuitive lunges into the nature of man, sex, God and

time, it comes from a slave, a wretch, who is closer to the divine than any of the other

characters. It is a cry across the abyss from the impotence to Apollo (Dionysus is quite

beyond horizon) and Pozzo, Gogo and Didi answer the cry by beating Lucky into

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unconsciousness. Lucky, the voice and the midwife to the rebirth of others is stricken

dumb, for he too suffers from failing powers. He too is overcome by the succession of his

defeats and so brought closer to death. Later, much later, at the end of the play, Vladimir

talks to the boy who brings the message that God will not come that day and as Vladimir

questions him about Godot, the boy says that Godot has a white beard. But Lucky, who

has a head of white hair, had begun his speech (Which again is the intellectual lock and

key of the play) by talking of “a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard...” exactly

the speech, which the others had destroyed. So Vladimir has a moment of agony: “Christ

have mercy on us!” he says to the boy. “Through vanity, through cupidity, through

indifference, through snobbery itself, Vladimir and Gogo have lost the opportunity to find

Godot - they have abused the link, which is Lucky.” (71) Mailer suggests that the

possibility of Lucky himself being Godot cannot be ruled out. Beckett perhaps was

hinting at the teachings of Christ that one finds life by kissing the feet of the poor, by

giving oneself to the most debased comers of the most degraded. Didi and Gogo lost their

chance of redemption by ill-treating Lucky. Mailer also suggests that God too had

become a failure. When Vladimir asks the boy what Godot does the boy answers,

“He does nothing, Sir.” There is an implicit suggestion that Godot too lives in the same

spiritual condition, the same insomnia, agony, limbo, the same despair of one’s failing

powers which hangs over the entire play.

Bonamy Dobree in his Drama in England (The Sewanee Review) suggests that

Didi and Gogo may symbolize the personal self, revealed to the self alone; the other

characters the outer self, the self that the world is aware of. Part of us is represented by

the preposterous bloated figure Pozzo, vulgar, pitilessly egotistic and power-wielding,

complacent yet self-pitying, impervious to the needs and sentiments of others. Something

of us may correspond with the miserable creature ironically called Lucky, whom Pozzo

drives in harness, addresses as “slave”, loads with burdens till he drops with fatigue, but

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who still is curiously happy. We see something of our duel public selves when we see

Pozzo living through him, since Lucky provides everything that Pozzo wants - a chair,

food, drink and even thought. Pozzo orders, “Slave Think!” and Lucky reels off in a

reciting voice a delicious rig morale of contemporary scientific - philosophic jargon,

such as we may read everyday and sometimes even utter. It seems to come off a

gramophone disc, of which the needle occasionally slips, so that phrases are repeated,

some more than once. The boy, a kind of not so innocent angel, protests ignorance of his

visit the previous evening. Dobree suggests that the boy is “perhaps the younger

generation that forgets the past experience of the race, so that it goes on repeating its

disastrous blunders, putting off forever the salvation of humanity, its Utopia, its Great

State its peaceful Confederation of Nations.” (74)

Raymond Williams in his Hope Deferred (New Statesman) draws the attention to

the image of the tree of life diminished to a bare or almost bare willow, which the tramps

would turn into a cross on which to hang themselves. There is the interaction between

body and spirit, which is very moving. Its imagery is continually enacted and is the

source of a very rich humor. The emotional tone of the play is determined by this

interaction: the coarse, unreliable yet often delighted body, across which the claims of the

spirit fall both to inspire and to terrify, thus interaction controls the language, which

moves with speed and subtlety between these dimensions. It is there too, within each pair.

Didi is waiting for Godot, while Gogo is waiting for death; it is, Didi who mainly speaks

to the messenger and who disturbs Gogo’s sleep; it is Gogo who wants rest, and Didi who

must restlessly wait. Between Pozzo and Lucky the separation is more absolute, in their

quite different world. It was Lucky, who gave Pozzo thought, but the enslaved mind has

broken down, into delirium and then dumbness, though it can still terrify the apparently

satisfied body, and in the end drags it down into its own collapse.

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Stanley Kauffmann’s essay Productions: Waiting for Godot which was originally

published in The New Republic analyses the French title En Attendant Godot that puts

more exactly the plays central agon: the passage of time. As Hamlet strives to fulfill his

father’s mission, as Oedipus strives to help his stricken city, so these two tramps struggle

merely to pass the time of their lives. Kauffmann cites E. M. Cioran who has said that the

essence of Beckett is not despair but mysticism: as if earthly life were an interruption of a

perfect state, an interruption somehow to be endured. Kauffmann claims that this play

certainly puts the enduring of life - the sense of passage through it - under the aspect of

eternity. Waiting for Godot is thus a theatrical articulation of the tramps time (Two Hours) in

relation to all of time.

Denis Johnston in his Waiting with Beckett calls Beckett a subtle arithmetician

who escapes concrete definition. His play can even be algebraic, in that the characters

have the quality of X. What X means depends not upon him, but upon us. If we feel that

the point of this life - the Intangible for which they (We) may be waiting - is God, then

indeed we may accept that solution as our X. If on the other hand, we feel no such thing,

the play can still have validity in other terms.

Harold Hobson in Samuel Beckett: Dramatist of the Year (International Theatre

Annual) gives the conversation he had with Samuel Beckett one summer morning in the

bar of the coupole [in Paris. France]. This shows a fragment of the author’s mind.

“You have lived in France a long time?” Hob said. “Yes” Beckett

replied. “But I still have my green Eire Passport”.

“What we are all arguing about in London”, Hob went on, “is the

meaning of Waiting for Godot”. I take no sides about that”, he quickly

responded. ‘There is” I went on, “the incident of Estragon’s boots”.

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The tramp estragon was always having trouble with his boots.

One of them would go on comfortably, and the other would not go

at all. In despair Estragon used to leave the boots in front of the

curtain.. .during the interval.

“One of Estragon’s feet is blessed, and the other is damned.

The boot won’t go on the foot that is damned; and it will go on the

foot that is not. It is like the two thieves on the cross”.

“You were brought up a protestant?” Hob enquired. “Yes, Almost

a Quaker. But I soon lost faith. I don’t think I even had it after

leaving Trinity”.

“And yet the thieves on the cross interest you, Vladimir is

troubled to account for one of them being lost and the other saved.

How can you be so preoccupied with this when you do not believe

in salvation?” (83)

Hobson says that at this point Beckett became eager, excited. His sharp, rugged

face leaned over the table, “I am interested in the shape of ideas even if I do not believe

them. There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine. I wish I could remember Latin. It is

even finer in Latin than in English, ‘Do not presume; one of the thieves was saved.

Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned’. That sentence has a wonderful shape.

It is the shape that matters.” (83)

In all the sentences that Beckett writes it is the shape that matters. His work is

founded on antithesis; he has established in literature the importance of the contradiction,

the contradiction that says, “Godot will come, Godot will not come. There is no such

thing as simple certainty in Beckett.

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Gunther Anders Being without Time; On Beckett’s Play Waiting for Godot

(Translated by Martin Esslin) sees Waiting for Godot as a parable. The dispute about the

interpretation of the parable ranges with utmost intensity. People quarrel about who or

what Godot is. Anders says that the people “answer with ‘death’ or ‘the meaning of life’

or ‘God’ as though it were the ABC of nihilism.” (84) Such critics it seems have given

the least thought to the mechanism by which all parables and hence Beckett’s parables

too, work. Anders calls this mechanism by the name “Inversion”.

Anders argues that when Aesop or Lafontaine wanted to say: men are like

animals; they did not show men as animals. Instead they reversed and this is peculiarly

amusing alienation effect of the fables. The two elements of the equation, its subject and its

predicate, that is: they stated that animals behave as man. Anders points out that this is the

process of substitution, which one should grasp before starting to interpret Beckett’s fable.

Anders further argues that in order to present a fable about a kind of existence,

which has lost both form and principle and in which life no longer goes forward, Beckett

destroys both the form and the principle so far characteristic of fables. Thus the destroyed

fable, the fable that does not go forward, becomes the adequate representation of stagnant

life. The meaningless parable about man stands for the parable of meaningless man.

True that this fable does not correspond to the formal ideal of the classical fable. “ But as

it is a fable about a kind of life that no longer has any point that could be presented in the

form of a fable, it is its weakness and its failure, which becomes its point; ...” (84)

It suffers from lack of cohesion because lack of cohesion is the subject matter.

It renounces relating an action because the action it relates is life without action. It defies

conversation by no longer offering a story because it describes man eliminated from and

deprived of, history that the events and fragments of conversations which constitute the

play arise without motivation, or simply repeat themselves (in so insidious a manner that

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those involved do not even notice the fact of the repetition). This lack of motivation is

motivated by the subject matter. This subject matter is a form of life without a motive

principle and without motivation.

Although it is a negative fable, it nevertheless remains a fable. Despite the fact

that no active maxims can be derived from it, the play remains on the level of abstraction.

While the novels of the last one hundred and fifty years had contended themselves to

narrate a way of life that had lost its formal principle, this play represents formlessness as

such and not only this, its subject matter is an abstraction. The characters are also

abstractions. The plays ‘heroes’, Vladimir and Estragon, are clearly men in general.

Anders says that they are abstract in the most cruel and literal sense of the word. “They

are ‘abs-tracti’ meaning pulled away, set apart. They having been pulled out of the world

and no longer have anything to do with it; the world for them has become empty.” (84)

Anders argues that the two heroes thus are merely alive but no longer living in

the world. This concept of abstraction is carried through with such merciless consequence

that other attempts at representing a form of life that has lost its world - and contemporary

literature, philosophy, and art are by no means poor in such a representation - appear cozy in

comparison. “Where a world no longer exists, there can no longer be a possibility of a

collision with the world and therefore the very possibility of tragedy has been forfeited.”

(84) Anders argues that the tragedy of this kind of existence lies in the fact that it does

not even have a chance of tragedy. It must always be a total farce unlike the tragedies of

our forbearers merely shot through with as a farce, as ontological farce, not as comedy.

This is what Beckett does.

Anders in the same article compares Waiting for Godot and Don Quixote, and

shows how closely abstraction and force are connected. Don Quixote had merely

abstracted from the actual condition of his world but not from the world as such.

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Beckett’s farce, therefore, is more ‘radical’ for it is not by placing people in a world or

situation which they do not want to accept and with which they therefore clash that

he produces his farcical effects, but by placing them in a place that is no place at all.

This turns them into clowns, for the metaphysical comicality of clowns primarily consists

in their being unable to distinguish between being and non-being, by falling down

non-existing stairs, or by treating real stairs as though they did not exist. But in contrast

to such clowns (like Chaplin) who, in order to create ceaseless laughter have to keep

themselves ceaselessly busy and who collide with the world almost on principle,

Beckett’s heroes are indolent or paralyzed clowns. For them, it is not just this or that

object, but the world itself that does not exist; hence they renounce altogether any attempt

to concern themselves with it.

“Nothing to do any longer.” ... Anders argues that in the twentieth century

‘action’ has become more and more questionable; not because the number of the

unemployed has increased but because millions who are in fact still active, increasingly

feel that they are acted upon. They are active without themselves deciding on the

objective of their action. They are active without even being able to know the nature of

that objective. They are unaware that their objective is suicidal in its objective. In short,

action has lost so much of its freedom that it itself has become a form of passivity.

Even where action is deadly strenuous or actually deadly, it has assumed the character of

futile action or inaction. Anders concludes that it becomes undeniable that Estragon and

Vladimir, who do absolutely nothing, are representatives of the modem man.

Anders further argues that they are fully representative only because, in spite of

their inaction and the pointlessness of their existence, they still want to go on and thus do

not belong to those who consider suicide. It is not despite the pointlessness of their life

that the Estragons and Vladimirs wish to go on living, but on the contrary, just because

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their life has become pointless. Ruined by their habit of inaction or of acting without their

own initiative, they have lost even the basic sense of human freedom not to go on living

in such a condition.

Anders thus argues that it is with this kind of life man continues existing just

because he happens to exist and Beckett’s play deals with such a life. It deals with it in a

manner basically different from all previous literary treatments of despair. The proposition

that one might attribute to all classical desperado figures (including Faust) might have

been expressed as: “We have no more to expect, therefore we shall not remain”. Estragon

and Vladimir, on the other hand, use ‘inversions’ of this formula: “We remain, therefore

we must be waiting for something”. And “We are waiting; therefore there must be

something we are waiting for.” (85)

To characterize this mode of life in which man continues to wait merely because

he happens to be, French commentators have used Heidegger’s term “Geworfenheit” (the

fact and state of having been “thrown” into the world). Anders argues that while Heidegger

in using this term, designates the contingency of each individual’s being just himself

(and demands that each take possession of his contingent being in order to make it the

basis of his own design.) but the two heroes of Beckett’s play do neither. Like the

millions whom they represent, they neither recognize their own existence as contingent,

nor think of abolishing this contingency, of transforming it into something positive with

which they can identify themselves. Anders argues that their existence is far less heroic

than that meant by Heidegger, which is far more trustful and far more realistic.

Anders further argues that they would be as little likely to deprive a chair of its

function and attribute to it a mere functionless reality, as to regard themselves in that

light. They are, “meta physicists” and so are ‘incapable of doing’ anything without the

concept of meaning. Heidegger’s term represents an express dethroning of the concept of

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“meaning of life”. Vladimir and Estragon, on the other hand, conclude from the fact of

their existence that there must be something for which they are waiting. They are

champions of the doctrine that life must have meaning even in a manifestly meaningless

situation. Anders clarifies that to say that they represent ‘nihilists’ is, therefore, not only

incorrect, but the exact reverse of what Beckett wants to show. As they do not lose hope,

are even incapable of losing hope, they are naive, incurably optimistic ideologists. What

Beckett presents is not nihilism but the inability of man to be a nihilist even in a situation

of utter hopelessness. Part of the compassionate sadness conveyed by the play springs not

so much from the hopeless situation as much as from the fact that the two heroes, through

their waiting, show that they are not able to cope with this situation, hence that they are

not nihilists. Thus their very defeat makes them increasingly funny.

Although the name ‘Godot’ undoubtedly conceals the English word ‘God’, the

play does not deal with him, but merely with the concept of God. Therefore God’s image

is left vague. What God does, as we read in the theological passage of the play, is

unknown. From hearsay it appears as though he does nothing at all. The only information

conveyed by his daily messenger boy, brother to Kafka’s Barnabas, is that, God will not

be coming today, but certainly tomorrow. Thus Beckett clearly indicates that it is precisely

Godot’s non-arrival, which keeps them waiting for him and their faith in him, alive.

Anders draws the similarity between Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Kafka’s

The Message; Of the Dead King. Whether this is a case of direct literary indebtedness

does not matter, for both the authors are des enfants du meme siecle (children of the

century), nourished by the same pre-literary source. Anders suggests that whether it is

Rilke, or Kafka or Beckett - their religious experience springs paradoxically, always

from religious frustration, from the fact that they do not experience God and thus

paradoxically, from an experience they share with disbelief. “In Rilke this experience

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springs from the inaccessibility of God (the first Duino elegy): in Kafka from

inaccessibility in a search (The Castle); in Beckett from the inaccessibility of God’s

existence can be formulated as: “He does not come, therefore he is.” Although Beckett

puts the conclusion that the non-arrival of Godot demonstrates his existence into the

mouths of his creatures, he not only doesn’t share this conviction, but also derides it as

absurd. His play therefore is certainly not a religious play; at most it deals with religion.

‘At most’, for what he presents is ultimately only a faith that believes in itself. Such a

faith is no faith.” (85)

Andrew again argues that when we try to find out how such a life, despite its

aimlessness, can actually go on, we make a most strange discovery. For although

continuing, such a life doesn’t go on, it becomes a “Life without time.” What we call

‘time’ springs from man’s needs and from his attempts to satisfy them. Objectives no

longer exist in the life of Vladimir and Estragon. For this reason, time does not exist

either, life is “treading water,” and it is for this reason, and quite legitimately, that events

and conversations go in circles.

Beckett carries this concept through with such complete consistency that he

presents a second act which is but a slightly varied version of the first act, thus offering to

our eyes nothing new or startling. Accustomed, as we are to encounter new situations in

the course of a play, we are deeply surprised by this lack of surprise, by the fact that the

scenes repeat themselves. One is filled with the horror that anyone feels in front of people

who suffer from amnesia. With one exception, none of the characters is aware of this

repetition. Even when reminded of it, they remain incapable of recognizing that their

experiences or conversations are merely recapitulations of yesterday’s events or talk.

Presenting the characters as victims of amnesia is absolutely legitimate for when there is

no time; there can be no memory either. Yet time here is not quite as rock like as so often

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in Kafka’s works. “Beckett leaves a rudiment of activity. There still remains a minimum

of time. Although a ‘stream of time’ doesn’t exist any longer, the ‘time-material’ is not

petrified yet. It still can some how be pushed back or aside and thus be turned into

something like ‘a part’. Instead of a moving stream, time in Beckett becomes something

like a stagnant mush.” (86)

Anders argues that the rudimentary activity which can temporarily set this time

mush in motion, however, is no longer real ‘action’, for it has no objective except to

make time move which, in ‘normal’ active life, is not the aim of action but its

consequence. Although this formula may sound paradoxical, if time still survives here, it

owes its survival exclusively to the fact that the activity of “time killing” has not died out

yet. Estragon and Vladimir resume their ‘activity’ time and again, because this kind of

activity keeps time moving, pushes a few inches of time behind them and brings them

closer to the alleged God.

This goes so far and the play achieves tmly heartrending tones. The two even propose

to act out feelings and emotions. They embrace each other. Anders says that emotions too are

motions and as such might push back the mush of stagnant time. If again and again Vladimir

and Estragon wrack their brains what to do next, they are doing so because “it helps them

to pass time”. Whatever they do, will as long as they are doing something, reduce the

distance that separates them from Godot. The best way to overcome the doldrums is

through the activation of their being together; through their ever renewed, taking

advantage of the chance, that it is at least as a pair they have to bear their senseless

existence. If they did not cling to each other desperately, if they could not rely on the

never ceasing to and fro of their conversation, if they had not their quarrels and if they

did not leave each other or reunite their actions which after all, cannot take place without

taking up time, they would actually be lost. “That Beckett presents us with a pair is, thus,

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not only motivated by his technical insight that a play about a Robinson Crusoe of

expectation would coagulate and become a mere painting, but also by his wish to show

that everyone is the other’s pastime.”(86) Anders thus argues that company facilitates the

endurance of the pointlessness of existence or at least conceals it. Such companionship

does not give an absolute guarantee that time will pass. It just helps now and then.

Anders further suggests that in ‘normal-life’ during the interludes of leisure time,

‘passing the time’ occurs and we play games. By simulating activity, we try to make that

time pass which otherwise would threaten to stagnate. One could object that we do this

only in our leisure time, that, after all, we separate “real life” from ‘play’; while in the

case of Estragon and Vladimir; it is just the incessant attempt to make time pass which is

so characteristic and which reflects the specific misery and absurdity of their life. It is

really legitimate to make this distinction between them and ourselves for there is really

no recognizable boundary line between our ‘real life’ and our ‘playing’.

Beckett is wholly realistic when he makes Estragon and Vladimir fail in their

attempts to play games and when he shows them unable to master their leisure time.

They are all the less able to do that because they do not possess yet, as we do, recognized

and stereotyped forms of leisure pastimes, neither sport or Mozart Sonatas. They are

forced to improvise and invent their games on the spot, to take activities from the vast

store of everyday actions and transform them into play in order to pass the time. “In those

situations in which we, the more fortunate ones, play football and, once we have finished,

can start all over again. Estragon plays the “de capo game,” “shoe off, shoe on”; not in

order to exhibit himself as a fool but to exhibit us as fools.”(86) He demonstrates this

through the device of inversions that our playing of games (the pointlessness of which is

made invisible by its public recognition) has no more meaning than his. Anders suggests

that the inverted meaning of the scene in which Estragon plays “shoe off, shoe on” reads:

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“Our playing of games is a shoe off, shoe on, too, a ghostly activity meant only to

produce the false appearance of activity. Thus it is not they but we who are the actors in

the farce. (86)

It is clear that the two must envy the fate of those fellow-men who do not need to

keep the “time - mush” moving themselves or who do this as a matter of course, because

they don’t know of any alternative. These antipodes are Pozzo and Lucky. Attempts to

decipher who they are and what they symbolize have kept the commentators no less busy

than the question of the identity of Godot. All these attempts have missed the point that

the pair itself has a deciphering function.

Anders avers that the two had already existed in the forms of concepts. They had

already played a role in speculative philosophy. Beckett has translated the two

abstractions into concrete figures. Since the early thirties Hegel’s dialectic and Marx’s theory

of the class struggle began to interest the younger generation in France. “The famous image

of the pair “master and servant” from Hegel’s Phaenomenologie des Geistes deeply

engraved itself into the consciousness of those intellectuals bom around 1900 and

occupied the place which the image of Prometheus held in the nineteenth century.

It became the image of man in general. The decisive factor in this new symbol is its

“pluralization” and its inherent “antagonism”. Man is seen as a pair of men and

individual, who as a metaphysical self-made man, had fought a Promethean struggle

against the Gods, has now been replaced by men who fight each other for domination.

It is they who are now regarded as reality. “To be” now means “to dominate” and to

struggle for domination. They alone are seen as the motor of time.”(87)

Anders sees in Pozzo and Lucky the Hegelian symbol of the motor of history

working. They step onto the stage on which, so far, nothing had reigned out “being

without time”. It was stagnation that reigned supreme. It is quite understandable that the

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entrance of this new pair intrigues the spectator who had at the beginning rejected the

stagnation as hardly acceptable. This might have been for aesthetic reasons. The spectator

in due course accepted this stagnation as the law of the Godot world. The spectator is

suddenly disturbed by the intrusion of characters that are undeniably active.

The envy is evident in the eyes of those who are sentenced to ‘being without

time’. The champions of time, even the most infernal ones, must appear as privileged

beings. Pozzo, the master is enviable because he has no need to “make time” by himself

or to advance by himself, not to speak of waiting for Godot, for Lucky drags him

forward. Lucky, the servant is enviable because he not only can march on, but also

actually must do so, for Pozzo is behind him and sees to it that he does. They pass by the

two timeless trams without knowing that they have already done so before. Blind history

is unaware of its being history. Pozzo is blind. The pair whether dragged or pulled, is

already in motion and therefore in Vladimir and Estrogen’s eyes, they are fortunate

creatures. It is, therefore, quite understandable that they suspect Pozzo (although he has

never heard Godot’s name and even mispronounces it as a matter of principle) of being

Godot himself. “They feel that behind Pozzo’s whip their waiting might find an end. It is

interesting that Lucky, the beast of burden, is called by that name. Although he has to

bear everything and spends his life carrying sacks filled with sand, he is totally freed

from all burdens of initiative and if they could stand in his place, they would no longer be

compelled to wait.” (87)

Martin Esslin in his Samuel Beckett; The Search for the Self; (The Theatre of the

Absurd) points out the awareness of Vladimir to the full horror of the human condition.

“The air is full of our cries ... But habit is a great deadener”. He looks at Estragon, who

is asleep and reflects, ‘At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, he is

sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on ... I can’t go on!’ The routine of waiting for

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Godot stands for habit, which prevents us from reaching the painful but fruitful

awareness of the full reality of being. Esslin finds Beckett’s own commentary on this

aspect of Waiting for Godot in his essay [Proust (1931)] quite illuminating:

Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is

habit. Life is habit or rather life is a succession of habits, since the

individual is a succession of individuals. ... Habit then is the

generic term for the countless treatises concluded between the

countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless

correlative objects. The periods of transition that separate

adaptations ... represent the perilous zones in the life of the

individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious, and fertile,

when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the

suffering of being. (95)

Vladimir and Estragon talk incessantly. They hint at it in what is probably the

most lyrical, the most perfectly phrased passage of the play.

Vladimir : You are right, we’re inexhaustible.

Estragon : It’s so we won’t think.

Vladimir : We have that excuse.

Estragon : It’s so we won’t hear.

Vladimir : We have our reasons.

Estragon : All the dead voices.

Vladimir : They make a noise like wings.

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Estragon Like leaves.

Vladimir : Like sand.

Estragon : Like leaves.

(Silence)

Vladimir : They all speak together.

Estragon : Each one to itself.

(Silence)

Vladimir : Rather they whisper.

Estragon : They rustle.

Vladimir : They murmur.

Estragon : They rustle.

(Silence)

Esslin suggests that this passage, in which the cross talk of Irish music-hall

comedians is miraculously transmuted into poetry, contains the key to much of Beckett’s

work. These rustling, murmuring voices of the past are the voices that explore the

mysteries of being and the self to the limits of anguish and suffering. Vladimir and

Estragon are trying to escape hearing them. Vladimir breaks the long silence that follows

their evocation, ‘in anguish’, with the cry ‘say anything at all!’ after which the two

relapse into their wait for Godot.

Esslin avers that the hope of salvation may merely be an evasion of the suffering

and anguish that spring from facing the reality of the human condition. “There is here a

truly astonishing parallel between the existentialist philosophy of Jean - Paul Sartre and

the creative intuition of Beckett, who has never consciously expressed existentialist view.

If, for Beckett as for Sartre, man has the duty of facing the human condition as a

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recognition that at the root of our being there is nothingness, liberty and the need of

constantly creating ourselves in a succession of choices, them Godot might well become

an image of what Sartre calls ‘bad faith’. The first act of bad faith consists in evading

what one cannot evade, in evading what one is.” (96)

The life of human beings on earth is monumentally futile. The civilization that

shines with human ideals cannot be imposed on the natural order for the simple reason

that death ends everything. Esslin calls our attention to the fact that the play does not

include any women. If it did, life might seem not so empty to Estragon and Vladimir, and

there might be some continuity to life, a continuity of banality perhaps, but at least

something less dismal than one the play describes.

Lucky’s speech farcically raises the questions of Godot relationship to man.

We hear him grotesquely juxtapose the sacred with the profane and the scatological,

when his demented mind turns the pattern of reasoned discourse into a farce. His stutter

seemingly accounts for such words as “acacacacademy” and “authropopopometry” and

yet, the seriousness of his concerns becomes apparent when his speech is stripped of its

elements of farce and travesty. He seems to suggest:

given the existence ... of personal God ... with white beard ...

outside time ... who from the heights of divine ... aphasia loves us

dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown ... and suffers

... with those who ... are plunged in torment ... it is established

beyond all doubt... that man ... fades away.

Esslin claims that this kind of half-serious, half-playful travesty, which abases dogma,

naive belief and theological authority, is also to be found in the fiction of James Joyce.

Ruby Cohn in her Just Play: Beckett’s Theater examines the avatars of Beckett’s

most pervasive verbal device, “repetition”. She avers that in Beckett’s verse and fiction

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of the 1930 he anchors an order in repetition but from 1949 to 1976 he seems to erode

order through the relentlessness of his repetition, which is one of his ways “to find a form

that accommodates the mess”. (99) Moreover, verbal repetition enhances and

counterpoints “gestural” repetition in drama. Ruby Cohn concentrates on what Beckett

has called “Word shed” in his poem Cascando.

Cohn avers that repetition, whether repetition or repetitive, occurs early in

Beckett’s verse and fiction, but Beckett constantly chose that device for his drama.

Eleutheria of 1947 does not call attention to its repetitions; Waiting for Godot of 1949

does this at several levels.” Act II nearly duplicates Act I; characters appear in couples

and one friend often echoes the other; gestures are repetitive - pacing, sitting, waiting and

especially falling; props are repetitive - derbies, high shoes, ropes, swiftly rising moons.

Above all, words are repetitive, so that the inattentive actor may miss a cue and omit or

repeat a whole scene; the inattentive spectator, bulled by echoes, may miss their

deepening force. Beckett means these repetitions to be experience in the theater, where the

audience can neither skip dull pages nor feed a computer for quick concordance.” (99)

A large number of Godot’s repetitions occur in the form of simple doublets,

where a word or phrase is heard again immediately or very soon after first mention. Cohn

suggests that though Godot’s boy speaks no simple doublet, the four main characters do.

A single doublet may be a single word: (99)

Vladimir : Relieved and at the same time... (he searches for the word)

appalled (with emphasis) AP-PALLED

Lucky : ....alas alas....

Or a phrase

Estragon : What’ll we do, what’ll we do....

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Emphasis is the intention of these repetitions as in everyday speech. The emphasis

may blend with emotion in the quotation, Vladimir is horrified, Lucky grieved, Estragon

despairing, and Pozzo threatening. Cohn points to the fact that simple doublets at times

seem merely mechanical:

Estragon : Come come, take a seat I beseech you.

Vladimir : So much the better, so much the better.

In the simple doublet the speaker repeats his own words. In the interrupted

doublet another speaker interrupts the original speaker, who then utters his repetition.

Early in Act I of Godot Estragon repeats after Vladimir’s correction:

Estragon : Looks to me more like a bush.

Vladimir : A shrub.

Estragon : A bush.

In the verse like sequences of Act II Estragon repeats, “Like leaves” and “they

rustle! “In the distanced doubles repetition is delayed too long to be readily recognizable

in the theater, as in the following example.” (99) The Grove Press edition separates the

repetition by eighty pages.

Estragon : What is it? Yes, but what kind?

Vladimir : I don’t know. A willow, I don’t know. A willow.

Despite in many simple doublets, the dominant rhythm of Waiting for Godot is set

in the duologues of Vladimir and Estragon, a variant of the Vaudeville pair of astute and

obtuse comedian - a variant because Vladimir is not always astute, not Estragon obtuse.

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As in Vaudeville, one friend often echoes the other’s words, changing the tone, in echo

doublets. Cohn says that simple doublets tend to slow stage time but echo doublets

usually propel the dialogue forward:

Estragon : In a ditch.

Vladimir : (admiringly) A ditch!

Vladimir : It’d give us an erection.

Estragon : (highly excited) An erection

Decidedly less often than doublets, Beckett resorts to triplets, whether simple or

echo. A simple triplet may be sarcastic:

Estragon : That would be too bad, really too bad (Pause) Wouldn’t

it, Didi, be really too bad?

Toward the end of Act II a triplet enhances Vladimir’s doubt whether Pozzo is

Godot: “Not at all!” (Less sure) Not at all! (Still less sure) Not at all!” This triplet attains

a climax impossible in a doublet. So, too in Pozzo’s anaphoric triplet: “Let us not then

speak ill of our generation. ... (Pause). Let us not speak of it either. (Pause) Let us not

speak of it at all!

“The basic building-blocks of dialogue repetition are simple or echo doublets,

which can be extended to triplets, quadruplets, and multiplets; larger units tend to break

rhythmically into doublets and triplets, as in the exchange about Lucky’s dumbness or

Pozzo’s blindness. At times, however, multiplets pile up into a pounder, spoken by a

single character. Lucky’s speech is a bravura, example, pounding several phrases, most

notably “I resume” and “alas”. One or more speakers may echo multiplets in a volley.

An example occurs early in Godot when Vladimir and Estragon volley the words “two

thieves”, “the savior”, and “saved”. A little later, they volley “tied”.” (99)

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Cohn avers that this brings to our mind the tradition device of verbal repetition,

the refrain. Though refrains are as old as poetry, they have not been explored in Drama.

The Princeton Encyclopedia of poetry and poetics begins its discussion of Refrain.

“A line or lines, or part of a line, repeated at intervals throughout a poem”. Problems then

crop up. Is a single word a valid “part of a line?” How far “intervals” be spaced?

How many repetitions add to “throughout?”...To be applicable to drama, Cohn suggests

that The Princeton Encyclopedia definition should be modified to include awareness of

an audience: “A meaningful word or words often repeated during the course of a play, so

that the audience grows aware of the repetition”. (100)

Doublets, triplets, volleys and pounders account for a large quantity of repetition

in Waiting for Godot, but the dense qualitative feeling rests on refrains. Six times (Act I,

two times and in Act II four times) we hear:

Estragon : Let’s go.

Vladimir : We can’t.

Estragon : Why not?

Vladimir : We’re waiting for Godot.

Estragon : Ah!

The word ‘Godot’ rings out as a refrain-word. Vladimir and Estragon twice

mention their wait for Godot; each declares, “I’m waiting for Godot” or “I waited for

Godot”. Vladimir’s conversations with Godot’s Boy contain ten references to Godot, and

Pozzo twice distorts the name. Cohn comments that the inscrutable and invisible Godot

becomes ubiquitous through his refrain name.

A polysemic refrain turns on the friends’ question of “what we do.” Seven times

Estragon asks “What’ll we do?” or “What do we do?” Cohn comments that his repetitions

may be paraphrased as: “What activity can we initiate? After Estragon casts doubts on the

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time and place of meeting Godot, Vladimir exclaims, “What’ll we do?” meaning:

“How can we know the right time and place?” After their discussion on hanging Vladimir

asks anxiously, “What do we do?” Understood though unspoken is “about hanging

ourselves.” When Estragon next repeats the questions, it may be shadowed with the

anxieties of Vladimir, who pronounces the last repetition. In Act II he looks at the three

men who have fallen to the ground, and he comments, “A diversion comes along and

what do we do?” The meaning has shifted to “How do we react?”

Cohn passes on from the interrogatives to the repeated negatives. Cohn refers to

the French concordance that counts 513 recurrences of the particle ‘ne\ usually translated

by English ‘not’ or ‘n’t’. Cohn argues that though the English disyllable ‘nothing’ is

innocuous, it commands attention by virtue of the thirty odd repetitions in ‘Godot’. Both

Vladimir and Estragon repeat the play’s opening line: “Nothing to be done”. Vladimir

varies it with “Nothing you can do about it,” and Estragon with “Nothing we can do

about it.” Vladimir sustains that the sentiment in such phrases as “We’ve nothing more to

do here”, “There’s nothing we can do,” “There’s nothing to do.” Estragon sees and hears

“nothing” and has “nothing” to show. Vladimir insists he has “nothing” to say to his

friend. Each of the friends comments, “It’s not certain,” but Estragon declares more

ambiguously, “Nothing is certain.” Cohn paraphrases this in two ways: “One can be

certain of nothing at all” or “The only certainty is nothingness.” (100)

“Nothing” is probably noticeable as a refrain, but probably unnoticeable is a

comparable refrain repeated by all but Lucky; “I don’t know.” Vladimir with his half-

dozen declaration of ignorance is outdone by Estragon with his dozen. The latter utters a

climatic variant: “I don’t know why I don’t know.”

Cohn says that these several refrain - waiting, doing, Godot, nothing - serve as

warp for the measured woof of doublets and triplets. Two adjectives in thematic tension

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with the waiting refrain are probably unnoticeable as refrain. The words “true” and

“happy” often recur, though the play theatricalizes the unattainability of truth and

happiness and it does so in part by reiterating those very words. Vladimir, Estragon and

Pozzo most often mean “Yes” when they say “True.” Vladimir is the first to speak the

word, agreeing to button his fly, and Estragon speaks it last, agreeing to pull up his

trousers. These key “trues” trivialize truth. (100)

Cohn further suggests that in contrast to ‘true’ whose meaning is mechanized,

‘happy’ retains meaning but is unrealizable. Toward the beginning of Act I Estragon

recalls the vision of a happy honeymoon. Toward the middle of Act I Pozzo toasts

“Happy Days” and analyses his own happiness. Towards the end of the act Estragon cries

out: “I’m unhappy.” When Estragon is asleep, Vladimir asks whether the Boy is unhappy.

The latter doesn’t know, and neither does Vladimir. By Act II, however, Vladimir

declares that he was happy when alone, then retracts: “Perhaps it’s not quite the right

word.” In Act I Vladimir was ‘glad’ to be back with Estragon again, but by Act II he

enacts a happiness he cannot feel. Cohn concludes that “it is an empty exercise, and

happiness soon dwindles to a vanishing point.” (100)

Cohn then makes a mention of the other refrain words; the nouns - boot, hat,

bone, carrot, trumps, tree, rope, whip, pipe and its synonyms, watch and its parts. These

refrain-nouns concretely present on stage but metaphorically extended through repetition.

Less frequent refrains are savior, thieves, and Christ with their sacramental associations.

The number ‘one’ becomes surprisingly significant through repetition, as do the several

cries for help and the references to beating, though only an alert spectator will recognize

them as refrains. The very theme of repetition is repeated in the innocuous word “again”

spoken some dozen times by the two friends and Pozzo. Though the word is too common

to function as a refrain, Vladimir performs the rare feat of stressing in a doublet: “There

you are again!”

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Cohn thus proves that Waiting for Godot “is woven with repetitions; Acts and

actions repeat; props, lightings and settings repeat: words repeat - doublets, triplets and

multiplets, in a single voice or two voices; less often, three voices and almost never four.

Only the refrain “nothing” sounds in five timbres.” (100)

Cohn further argues that although Beckett uses the same building blocks of

repetition in all five characters, the emotional effect is quite different. Vladimir and

Estragon repeat to fill their endless wait. Pozzo repeats the mechanical commands to

Lucky or faltering explanations to the friends and the cliche comparisons of Lucky to a

broken record merely emphasizes the mechanical surface of his speech. This variety of

repetition is rarely noticed on a first viewing of Godot, but Vladimir’s round song:

A dog came in the kitchen

And stole a crust of bread

Then cook up with a ladle

And beat him till he was dead

And all the dogs came running

And dug the dog a tomb -

He stops, broods, resumes:

Then all the dogs came running

And dug the dog a tomb

And wrote upon the tomb stone

For the eyes of dogs to come:

A dog came in the kitchen

And stole a crust of bread...

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And Lucky’s monologue;

Given the existence as uttered forth in the public

Works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal

God quaquaquaqua with white beard

Quaquaquaqua outside time without extension

............................ tennis..... the stones.............

so calm...........Cunard....... unfinished.............

Cohn says that these two obstreperously call attention to themselves. She claims

that “the Chinese-Box song about the doomed dog in the kitchen can be pounded ad

infinitum about an infinite number of doomed dogs and we can readily understand its

appeal for one of Beckett’s temperament.” (101)

Unlike the old dog-song, Lucky’s monologue is a highly original structure,

however it borrows from the vocabulary of logic, theology, medicine, sports, and

meteorology. It is entirely reasonable in Lucky’s tirade that the most frequent repetition is

“for reasons unknown”. The phrase embraces Lucky’s own learning and the wait for

Godot. Lucky’s words are flamboyantly repetitive and they differ from repetitions of the

other characters in being disconnected from stage time, place, and props. Lucky is

literally as well as colloquially “out of it”. Cohn further adds that “like Vaudeville

comedians, Vladimir and Estragon quip about immediacies; even Pozzo, for all his

rhetoric, discourses on the visible twilight. But Lucky pounds at Western Civilization -

both repetitive and repetition.” (101)

“Verbal repetition serves Beckett as music, meaning, and metaphor. The repetitions

themselves are very various, and against that background, singular phrases shatter “as one

frozen by some shudder of the mind.” (101)

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Geoffrey Strickland in his article The seriousness of Samuel Beckett sums up the

spirit of this rare dramatist. Beckett for all his preoccupation with ultimate realities is

among the least mysterious of writers but an enigma. “The more disturbing one finds him

the more compelling the need to answer the questions: Should one take him seriously?........

Does enjoyment of Art entail contemplation of some inescapable truth?” (110) Though

there may be a controversy on such questions, the fact cannot be denied that he gives

meaning to human destiny though in a terrible way. Beckett is an artist who undermines

the very means by which meaning is engendered. It shows us the delusive artificiality of

all the stories we tell about one another both false and ostensibly true. Beckett’s art

“modified” the ideal order formed by “early monuments”. The sardonic epigrams and the

farcical or terrible moments are scattered throughout his entire ‘oeuvre’.

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