Before examining in the general sense how time relates to the characters in the play it is necessary to first analyse how they themselves consider their situation. Time appears to have become irrelevant and insignificant for the two vagrants, the act of waiting is the sole occupation of their minds and it is almost as if they have created the act of waiting as a specific activity to avoid becoming conscious of the passage of time and experiencing nothingness. Godot is mere fiction, a mental fabrication which they can cling to, hope for while simultaneously providing the audience with hope and a potential source of drama in the play. Their conceptions of time and place are unnaturally indistinct and obscured. They unsuccessfully attempt clarification for instance when Estragon ponders “But what Saturday? And is it Saturday? Is it not rather Sunday? Or Monday?” he is squandering time, putting the play outside all temporal reality while seeming to be immersed in its categories. Human beings divide their lives into segments – years, months, days, hours etc – take away these essential divisions and madness will initially befall followed by a gradual submission that we can exist without the constraints of numbers and time. There is something strangely comforting therefore about the tramps’ perceptions of time and place. While they assign all their energies to what amounts to an imaginary activity (waiting for Godot) in order to avoid all consciousness of isolation and deprivation this act of lunacy will eventually come to fruition in that they will eventually actually forget about time and mellow into their own small world, the world of Godot-land.
Of course the isolation suffered by Vladimir and Estragon is utterly horrific. They are effectively presented to us as naked, bare, stripped of all the superficial objects and so- called ‘purposes’ which we as human beings seize in order to give ourselves meaning and structure. The hustle and bustle of everyday life is a distraction we’ve essentially manufactured so as to circumvent stopping and waiting, consciously apprehending the passage of time. It is a terrible thing to listen to a ticking clock, to wonder where time goes and most of all to have to wait. The future is daunting for many of us but knowing that there is an end is at least comforting while we ‘struggle’ through life’s events, its joys, its sorrows, its twisted little turns of fate. Waiting is what happens in between our birth and our death – the real events that seek to give our lives signification and essence. Relief will be when the wait is over, though in reality humans tend to draw comfort from mere hope that the wait will end. Though this statement may not be true in terms of our lives eventually ending (because our death is the one thing that we can be certain of) it is relevant with regard to certain events which happen throughout life. Pain and suffering may end, Godot may arrive (though he is fictional) – hope is ever present and when hope ends life is grim reality.
For Vladimir and Estragon the wait will never end. Their only alternative to waiting is suicide which they lack the courage and initiative to carry through. Their tortured personalities are imitative of many characters in Beckett’s plays. Void of all sociological context and physical devices they panic. The sparseness and emptiness of their world has fruitcaked them, they become mindless creatures who alleviate their boredom through innocuous harebrained chatting and farcical moments of clowning. The tramps arouse laughter in their public despite their alienation from the social norm and despite the total pessimism of their philosophy. The humour generated by these imbeciles is not humour in the true sense; it serves as a reprieve to darker underlying issues. The audience receives it well, the tramps momentarily forget about their plight, everybody is happy yet nobody is happy. The play is often viewed by critics as an ‘emptiness’ that requires filling. The stage is sparse; the characters must make it their own. There is no script, they must write one. The audience cannot be content with taking the play on face value, they must search for meaning. Godot challenges all and its modern Absurdist quality is clearly evident. In scene after scene the permanent absurdity of the world is stressed. For example in the scene between Pozzo (the master) and Lucky (the slave) Lucky is held on a leash by Pozzo. He carries a heavy suitcase without ever thinking of dropping it and he is only able to utter his long incoherent speech when he has his hat on and when Pozzo commands him to think. The fusion of Absurdist ideas and tortured characters is a combination which works well. Lack of chronological order, minimalist setting and disjunctive language have the accumulative effect of blurring the viewers perception of the play, we are constantly being reminded of the action and subject of Godot, those of waiting and time respectively. The characters’ perceptions have also been made cloudy for this purpose – what many critics consider the ‘sfumato’ effect. For instance when Estragon says “We should have thought about it a million years ago, in the nineties”, the phrase “a million years ago” cannot be taken to mean simply a long time ago, Estragon has simply lost all perspective on time. Losing such perspective also has the effect however of giving the play a timeless dimension, the issues with which the play concerns itself will always be relevant, allowing the play to come to rest in a specific period of history would simply inhibit this effect. Actuality/real events in Godot have also become muddled. Were there to be an easy-to-follow sequence of events the audience would inevitably be drawn away from the main focus of the play in wonder of what will happen next. Instead we are grounded in repetitiveness; the two acts follow a similar pattern with minor alterations. Chaos reigns in a world where the previous day cannot be distinguished from the present day. Estragon is beaten every night yet we never see any bruises or hear any detailed account from him. There is a world in the play; it appears to be peopled from what we learn from Lucky and Pozzo. They are on their way to a fair yet exasperating for the audience they never reach this place and worse still when we meet them in Act 2 Pozzo has been blinded mysteriously and lucky been struck dumb. Exploration of plot never becomes Beckett’s intention, even the hope of Godot arriving vanishes early in the play when Vladimir and Estragon argue randomly about where they must wait.
Time in Waiting for Godot is often considered from an acutely scientific point of view. Two of the theories of time in Beckett’s drama are cyclical time and linear time upon which Bert O. States expounds in detail in his essay on the play. States argues that the action of Vladimir and estragon represent cyclical time while that of Pozzo and Lucky follows linear time and that therefore the time scheme in Waiting for Godot is a compound of the two proceeding to an end by way of cyclical repetition. Thus the action of the characters throughout the play forms a number of imaginary circles progressing in one direction. This view is credible though it can be discredited easily when one considers Pozzo and Lucky and the time scheme in which they appear to inhabit. While they appear to be going somewhere at the start of the play, by the end they have progressed nowhere, having failed to reach the nearby fair. A preferred theory is that Pozzo and Lucky are encircling Vladimir and Estragon. They are going nowhere within their universe which may or may not be a real and operating society but at least they are mobile and relatively sane, they occupy a kind of purgatory between isolation and madness and association and sanity.
Waiting for Godot is indeed a fascinating examination and summation of the human existence. The play emphasizes the common nature of waiting among all people, and therefore it suggests that the meaningless of time is universal. If one is always for something to happen the periods during that wait end up being meaningless and if the event finally does happen the process repeats itself. If that something never occurs all time becomes a meaningless wait. In any case one is always caught in a period in which time has no purpose and waiting is the only goal. This idea is demonstrated well in Waiting for Godot for throughout the play the protagonists waited and nothing memorable seemed to happen. From this one can deduce that time has virtually no significance or meaning. To conclude Beckett’s Godot is itself liable to make a person mad. Think about time and death at length and one will begin to fear, to dread, to tire, to admire, to wonder, to stare at clocks, to love distractions such as this…
Bibliography
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Waiting for Godot: a tragicomedy in two acts by Samuel Beckett, New York: Grove 1970
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Waiting for Godot, David Bradby, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press 2001
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The Shape of Paradox: An Essay on Waiting for Godot, Bert O. States, Berkely:
University of California Press 1978
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Just Play: Beckett’s Theatre, Ruby Cohn, Princeton university Press, 1980
