Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot

Samuel Beckett

Waiting for Godot

Godot has a white beard. Beckett uses a country road because it is common and two tramps because of the meaningless of the human life and the absurdity.

Plot

When the play begins, Vladimir and Estragon are waiting on a country road for the mysterious Godot, who send a boy to inform them he will come the following day. The two tramps are talking saying nothing relevant, just to fill the silence and to kill the time. They are thinking about separation and even suicide. As opposed to the two tramps, Pozzo and Lucky. Make continuous purposeless journeys to fill their existence. At the end, Godot will never come. The message of the play is that nothing can be done by human being except waiting. Waiting means making the experience of the flow of the time, While we are waiting to someone who arrive or something to happen, time becomes "the" object of all our thoughts and attention. In this play we understand the Absurd essence of the human condition. Man is trapped in a hostile universe where he is destined to physical and spiritual desegregation and to silence. For this reason Beckett created a surrealistic theatre, the Theatre of Absurd: he didn't intend to represent reality but to represent the deeper reality revealed through dreams or nightmares, he didn't represent action but he conveys a poetic image allusive of human condition, he expressed a sense of confusion for the lack of meaning of the world which appears illogical and absurd.

Structure

The play is divided into two acts: it has no development in time, and it is in a repetitive present. It has no setting but a country road and a tree. It has no plot and there is no action. The characters have not really a conversation in the sense that they do not reveal information about their present situation.

Symmetric structure

The play is divided into two halves parts by a tree. The human race is divided into 4 parts: Didi-Gogo, Pozzo-Lucky and then into 2 parts again: the boy and Godot's sort.

Characters

Vladimir and Estragon or Didi and Gogo are never described as tramps: they are two human being concerned with the question about nature, world and God. They are complementary, two different aspects of a single whole. Vladimir is more rational; Estragon is more subconscious, and sceptical about Godot. Pozzo and Lucky are linked by a rope, as master and servant. Lucky is servish and represents the power of the mind and Pozzo is the oppressor and represents the power of the body. Godot means little God and the play has so a religious interpretation.

The lack of coherence

The play presents the Absurd as the essence of the human condition; there is no heroism and the only possible reality for them is endless waiting.

The comic and the tragic:

Beckett's pessimism is intensified by his perception of the meaningless of human life and by his notion of time as a series of meaningless events.

The language

The language of the play is informal and there is a lack of communication shown by silence, pauses and gags. The play was originally written in French because Beckett can think simply and he can reduce speech to its essentially.

Influences

Pirandello and Brecht. Pirandello's. Things can be seen in opposite way from what he really appears. This reversed things that is the reflection which goes behind human convention, is the so called humour. Brecht instead chose the technique of estrangement, where the audience is asked to play an active role within the theatrical performance. Beckett's denies the alienating humour conditions and uses the estrangement technique but is the whole life to be alienating.

John Osbourne

The themes are isolation and frustration. Porter is against all middle class values and social injustices. He works in a market store. He has married an upper middle class for revenge and to improve his situation.

The Angry Young Men

The movement represented a revolt against their age, a rejection of traditional values and an aspiration to something different. They have some quarrel (litigio) with the events and aspects of the time:

1) the fall of Winston Churchill's Cabinet (politica) in 1945.

2)The dissolution of the Colonial Empire.

3) the end of socialist revolution in 1951.

4)The disillusionment of many people in politic.

5) the religious establishment, because of the irrelevance of Anglican Church and the attempt to revive religious belief seen by many as an irrational escape from the dangers, terrors, and evils of the Nuclear age.

6) the English Sunday with its stifling atmosphere of stagnation and its Sunday papers.

Realism and political concern were the main features of his theatre, usually referred to as "kitchen sink drama". The theatre of Anger is both a reaction against the previous generation of middle-class playwrights and an attempt to give voice to dissatisfied younger generations and their political concern.

Comparison with the Beat Generation

Similar to the Angry Young Men developed in the USA the Beat Generation of the Beats or Beatniks. The principal name were Jack Kerouac, Salinger, Ginsberg and others. The Beatniks rebellion was far of a total withdrawal (ritiro) from conventional society than the English Angry Men's and was often associated with use of alcohol and narcotics and other antisocial attitudes, it also involved with vagabondage, total sexual freedom and other phenomena. Firstly it appeared negative but then it developed a strong involvement with the tragic generation such as the atomic menace, racial discrimination, freedom of education, the political tyranny of the military-industrial complex women's liberation, Black Power, anti-colonialism, the Vietnam War etc. While the anger of Young Men is no longer effective, the protest of the younger generation of American has ample scope for activity and shows definite promise for the future.