Beckett - Waiting for Godot

Beckett - Waiting for Godot

In this tragedy there are two tramps ( vagabondi ): Vladimir and Estragon, that are waiting for Godot ( could be an object in this story represent the death). While they are waiting, they talk with verbal games ( meaningless = insignificante ) and misunderstandings. Until a boy comes to say that Godot isn't coming that day but will come the next one. The only scenery is the tree that is the passing of time, the passing of the season. The next day the boy comes again to say that Godot isn't coming but will come the next day. The tramps, during their waiting, consider suicide, hanging ( appendersi ) themselves from a tree, but they never do anything.

This is a play full of humour. Beckett doesn't want to tell the story, he wants to show our fate that is something encircled by nothing ( death ).

Godot can be anyone: God, death, hope,..

The world Beckett presents in waiting for Godot is the real world: a world without illusions, the reality in its essence. In fact the scene, in the tragedy, is a country road and a tree: the natural world that represents  the only truth for him. For Beckett everything the man has created and built in the natural reality is illusion and doesn't represents the true reality.

The two tramps are the symbol of the individualism in the reality without Pirandello's masks, without any social roles and their waiting represents the essence of life. Life for the writer is a cycle of birth, growth and death and everything happens during these different moments can't change it. So life can be considered like the waiting for death, that is the final step of the series and nobody can avoid it. Suffering is the main component of life, all the individualism suffer like Vladimir and Estragon. They consider the suicide as a solution to their sorrow ( dolori ), but they don't commit it because for Beckett death can't be a solution to their problem, it can't solve the problem of life. The two tramps, during their waiting, do strange (strane ) things like looking for something in a hat or a shoe. These strange acts represents all the useless things men do in the reality, during their waiting " useless " because they can only hide ( nascondere ) the truth and prevent ( impedire ) men from discovering the essence of life.

Vladimir and Estragon speak each other but they don't understand, this is the symbol of the lack ( mancanza ) of communication that characterize the condition of individualism in the society ( like the people on the London bridge in the Waste Land by Eliot ). The concept of the " Life as waiting " is present in Joyce too. The difference is that in Beckett it is the " waiting for death " in Joyce it is the waiting for the realization of a Divine purpose (scopo ). In fact for Joyce the man has to find a way to survive in the reality because he must wait for that purpose. He find that solution in Ulysses and in the union of three important elements that each man has to possess: individualism must have the consciousness of what life is (Mr. Bloom), they must have ideals and dreams (Stephen Dedalous) and finally they must love (Molly).