THE ABSURD IN WAITING FOR GODOT

THEATRE OF THE ABSURD

“Developed in the late 1950’s and early 60’s; the theatre of the absurd, as the term suggests, is meant to give dramatic  expressions to the philosophical notion of the absurd.” To define the world as absurd is to recognize its fundamentally impossible to read nature, and this recognition is frequently associated with feelings of loss, worthlessness and bewilderment. “To such feelings the theatre of the absurd gives ample expression, sometimes leaving the observer perplexed with the incoherent, meaningless, or repetitious dialogues, strange behaviour and plots which deny the notion of logical and realistic development”.

 “The term theatre of the absurd derives from the philosophical use of the word absurd by such existentialist thinkers as Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre. Camus, particularly, argued that humanity had to resign itself to recognize that a fully satisfying rational explanation of the universe was beyond its reach; in that sense, the world must ultimately be seen as absurd. The playwrights loosely grouped under the label of the absurd, as an attempt to convey their sense of bewilderment, anxiety, and wonder in the face of an inexplicable universe. They rely heavily on poetic metaphor as a means of projecting outward their innermost states of mind. The images of the theatre of the absurd tend to assume the quality of fantasy, dream, and nightmare; they do not portray the inner reality”. Beckett and others who adopted this style felt that this disoriented feeling was an honest response to the post World War II. Waiting for Godot remains the most famous example of this form of drama.

THE DILEMMA OF HOPE AND THE ABSURDITY OF WAITNIG FOR SOMEONE WHO WILL NEVER COME.

One of the most ambiguous aspects of Beckett's play is, the dilemma of who Godot really is, since his identity is never revealed, the reader might infer that this character of Godot is a representation of God. In a way if the reader analyzes all the Biblical allusions, it is quite easy to infer that Godot is God, but Beckett apparently stated that if he had meant to name the play "God," he would have written "God" as a title. The interpretation, then, would be of two men waiting for someone named Godot, whose identity is not revealed. Godot is seen as a hope for salvation or a proof of its existence, which apparently will never come. Every day, a messenger in the body of a boy appears saying that Godot will come tomorrow, and this tomorrow has been repeated in the play at least two times, but it is strange to think about the possibility of being more than two times, since the setting has been the same since the beginning of the play.

        “The time in the play is also important since the play takes place in two acts, being each act one day in the life of the characters. The concept of the time leads to a general irony. Each minute spent by the characters  waiting brings them closer to death. The passage of time is also clear by the tree which has grown leaves, indicating a possible change of seasons, ever since, the exact time or season in the play is not mentioned. Another indication of time is set in the characters of Pizza and Lucky, which  are affected by time, since Pozzo goes blind and Lucky mute in the second day”.

        The fact that the world of Waiting for Godot is bizarre and at the same time confusing to understand is the way Beckett plays with his characters and the time, since the first day of the play Pozzo and Lucky appear, they talk and interact with Vladimir and Estragon, then a messenger from Godot appears, and the next day everything changes radically, Pozzo and Lucky do not recall being in that place the previous day, and apparently Pozzo is blind, and Lucky is mute, when a day before he gave a long monologue, and the messenger who was there the day before, states that he has never been there before, and implies that Mr. Godot, will come tomorrow.

        It is never clear whether Godot is real or not, in both acts, Vladimir and Estragon mistaken Pozzo of being Godot. Since they have never actually seen Godot, and would not be able to recognize whether a passer-by is or not Godot. The only thing they know is that he will come tomorrow, ever since his messenger boy comes at the end of each day to inform them that Godot will again not be coming, but will surely come tomorrow. The strange thing about the boy is that he never remembers the last day, which again is another indication of the absence of a sequence in time.

        Vladimir and Estragon are always seeking for something to pass the time with, since they have to wait for Godot to come, they try to distract themselves by arguing about dull topics, sleeping, talking to Pozzo and Lucky and even trying to commit suicide, which they cannot do, ever since they have problems agreeing on who will go first, or the belt ripping of. All of their attempts on waiting might also indicate that they are waiting for something that does not exist or even part of their imagination. They do not want to realize that their lives are meaningless.

 It is not until the end of the second act, that Vladimir, the more philosophical of the two, comes to the conclusion that they will always be waiting for Godot, and that he is just a distraction from their useless lives, and that he can even predict, ironically, when the boy comes again, and everything that the boy will say. Everything will take place time after time as long as Vladimir realizes that he is trapped and that he must go on, because there is no other choice.  

CONCLUSIONS:

The role of humans in the world is something difficult to explain, our purpose in life is an unanswerable question. It seems as something difficult to answer, because we do not know who to ask, our existence in this world and the existence of life in other planets is something that anybody is able to answer. Existence, as it is stated in the Bible has been imposed on us by an unknown force or energy, and energy that does with us whatever it wishes. The world seems to be chaotic, a world that since the beginning and through the crucification of Jesus it has been getting worse. Therefore we try to make something out of it through fabricated purposes to distract ourselves from the fact that our situation is hopelessly vast. Waiting for Godot is a play that captures this feeling and view of the world. According to the play, a human being's life is totally dependant on chance, ever since, waiting has always been the chance of finding  hope and both Estragon and Pozzo are dependants of their companions , time has let trough an invention of forces, which may be real or not.

 In the play waiting has been set as hope, Samuel Beckett uses many pauses, silences, and ellipses to give the play the sense of waiting and the time is not also wasted by the characters but also by the reader, Beckett wants the reader to feel as if he or she were waiting too, since in order to follow the track of the play, we as readers have to respect the punctuations set in the book and therefore we are also waiting for Godot to appear in the reading. Beckett not only plays with his characters but with the reader too, ever since we are reading and feeling the emotions of the characters, we find ourselves confused about the time and the way the characters role changes in the second act, and the fact that we as I mentioned before are also waiting for Godot, a Godot that unfortunately in the play and in real life never showed up.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

DICTIONARY OF LITERATURE, Geddes and Grosset, London, 1999.

DRABBLE, Margaret, The Concise Companion to English Literature, Oxford University Press, Great Britain, 1993.

 ANDRES, Gunther, Being without time on: Beckett's Play Waiting for Godot, Prentice- Hall, Englewood, 1965.

BECKETT, Samuel, Waiting for Godot,  Grove Weidenfeld, New York, 1954.