In Beckett’s superb craftsmanship, the waiting and changelessness of Gogo and Didi are balanced against Pozzo and Lucky’s perpetual wandering. Just as the former are tied to space, the latter, with their compulsion to be constantly moving, are inseparably linked to time. That is why time stagnates and it becomes energetic and moves when they are in the company of the way faring simple. Pozzo and Lucky incarnate time’s twin qualities of change and changelessness – they are the only ones in the play who change. Pozzo changes from his wonderful sight to complete blindness and Lucky who has already undergone a dramatic change since we saw him first a leader of beautiful things to an incoherent babbler – changes from a speaking animal to a dumb automation who cannot even groan. These changes signify concrete human time on the level of the individual existence and experience. But in Beckett’s perception of it, it leads inexorably towards loss, decay and deformation – life is valued as a brief flash of night that gleams an instant between birth and death. Significantly, even in the historical level that is, on the level of the collective existence and experience – this time is perceive as a devitalizing process – in which man continues to waste and pine.
Time’s changelessness, its circular stasis, is signified in Pozzo and Lucky’s perpetual wanderings. Traveling has become a deadening habit with them. They feel that they are going somewhere, Pozzo even says in the first Act that he is taking Lucky to the fair to sell him. But actually they are going round and round in a circle. Thus they are trapped in the circular time of the universe. Gogo and Didi too are trapped with in the unchanging circularity of time in which day and night follow each other in a cycle process.
-- But night does not fall.
-- It’ll fall all of a sudden, like yesterday.
-- Then it’ll be night.
-- And we can go.
-- Then it’ll be day again. (Pause despairing) What’ll we do, what’ll we do!
In the ultimate of philosophical framework of the book this temporal circularity is perceived as a stasis, a meaningless and everlasting repetition of seasons, days and hours. Pozzo, after he has lost his sight and with it his sense of time realizes this in his last speech:
“Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time? It’s abominable! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day, like any other day, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you?”
Thus time’s changes in the play are experienced as static circularity. In this, Beckett’s time is like Eliot’s Christian time – in hell which turns and yet rains forever still. But, in direct contrast to Eliot, in Beckett there is no possibility of its redemption through a vertical intervention buy some transcendental power – a god or a Godot.
Also time in Beckett only destroys and preserves nothing. Again, it is in contrast to Ralph Hudson’s idea of time in his poem ‘Time, You Old Gipsy Man’ that, time in its onward march, destroys one civilization and builds another. In Beckett time preserves no positive aspect because here physical nature follows its own cyclical movement – man is born, grows old and dies. The sun rises and sets, the bare trees sprout leaves and will be bare again, but Godot, the only absent possibility of escape from this existence trap never comes. It is at this level of the idea of the emptiness and meaninglessness that time and space are coordinated in the play and gives it philosophical setting.
From one sense, the tramps’ endless waiting for the Godot symbolizes timeless or the infinity of time. Waiting has become so habitual or integral to the life of Vladimir and Estragon that apart from it thus have no identity or existence. The play’s whole structures work by dead silence which they have to break to ensure that time passes and they exist. Their miserable struggle to make time move adds tragic stress to human conditions; caught in the trap of endless waiting, they are afraid to contrive ways to crate ripples in the ocean of time. They have to do futile exercises, play meaningless debates, try their boots, juggle words to keep them spirited in the dull routine of waiting –
-- Would that be a good thing?
-- It’d pass the time.
Such activities make the time move and they feel somewhat relieved from its burden, as Vladimir says –“Time flows again already. The sun will set, the moon will rise and we away ----- from here.”
Apparently, this onward march of time leaves no impact in their lives because they are used to thinking that time past in time forgotten ands it is not of memory. Pozzo strikes the idea when he says – “I don’t remember having met any one yesterday. But tomorrow I won’t remember having met anyone today.”
The absences and uncertain tries of memory on the characters’ part would seem to suggest that they live entirely in the present. But what is the present without the past or the future? Its house is the temporal space between ‘no longer and not yet. But for Gogo and Didi the present exists merely as an unbearable route to a future in which Godot’s arrival will justify their present waiting. But Godot won’t turn up, the past is lost to memory, the futures no yet and never to be, and the present is negated. Time is in this timeless play is simultaneously absent and present.
Nonetheless, yesterday is not actually dead; rather it is the past that shapes the present –
“There is no escape from yesterday. Yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us …… Yesterday is ………… irremediably past of us, with us, heavy and dangerous.”
The tramps cannot realize it because they are deprived of the power of feeling or imagination.
In Beckett’s world, time in its circular movement leads to decay and loss. There is nothing optimistic about it. It is only human, subject way of trying to impose meaning on the meaningless.
