Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot

Samuel Beckett's play seems to endlessly perplex reviewers: they want to see in it concrete associations that it generally denies them. Is Godot God? Are Didi and Gogo heroes for their seemingly indefatiguable faith he will arrive, or fools for hinging all their hopes and dreams on a man who never seems to arrive to help alleviate their suffering? Waiting for Godot, in proper Modernist fashion, strips away all the layers of narrative and form and leaves nothing but the naked husk of a play, which Beckett no doubt felt revealed the human condition at its most basic. But the play's power doesn't really come from that. Rather, what makes Waiting for Godot so compelling is its wide applicability: it's a story about random oppression, brutality, and dreams deferred by harsh realities. It has been performed as an allegory of apartheid South African, the Jim Crow South, the horror of the war in Bosnia and about every other possible situation imaginable. Why? Because as Benjamin Kunkel pointed out in a piece in The New Yorker not so long ago, "[N]ot everyone has a God, but who doesn't have a Godot?" Beyond the metaphysical implications of the play, though, it's popularity stems from its near-perfection: for all the philosophical meaning people see in it, the action progresses with virtually no direct reference to it, and every line which seems to suggests some sort of grand significance has a very concrete meaning in the action. Take the infamous opening: Estragon, the first of the tramps, struggles to pull off his boot to relieve his swollen foot. Unable to get it off, he gives up and announces "Nothing to be done." Vladimir, wincingly wandering onto the stage and grasping at his crotch (precious few readers and actors for that matter seem to grasp that one of the play's running jokes is Vladimir's venereal disease, which causes him immense pain when urinating), thinks Estragon is commenting on his own ailment, and announces, "I'm beginning to come round to that conclusion myself. All my life I've put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything! And I resumed the struggle." On the one hand, the lines relate concretely to the action of the play; on the other, they have become representative of modern man's ambivalence towards a cruel and uncaring world, and such clever cynicism has linked Beckett to the French Existentialists in whose circles he moved after the Second World War. But seen merely as declamatory statements of world-weary cynicism, the lines lose all their power; Beckett's achievement comes from his ability to link such nihilistic sentiments to extremely comic moments, and it is the humor that carries the reader or the theatergoer through what would otherwise be an unbearably cynical play. Steve Martin, who played Vladimir in a famous 1982 production at the Lincoln Center in New York, put it best when he said that he sought to serve the humor of the play, because the meaning could carry itself but the hum

Some think Waiting for Godot is an argument for existentialism. Others believe it is about man's eternal struggle for the answer to the ultimate question. Neither seem correct. In short, this is a play for those who prefer to strip everything down to the most basic form of language, to strip life down to a mere game of waiting. That is, in essence, what this is all about. We have two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, who both wait for a man who may or may not ever show up. They don't know why. They don't know exactly when he will be there. Still they wait, eternally, by the tree, by wherever they think he said he would show. This isn't an absurdist play, although it has been labeled as such. Absurdism, though, seems such an insulting way of labeling such a masterpiece. We oftentimes go thorugh our readings with the idea that everything has to be complex, that there has to be a theme placed deep within a convoluted story, but with Waiting for Godot, we have a simple theme: waiting. The two characters symbolize nothing. They are, quite simply, not waiting to be analyzed. They become, in effect, victims of Samuel Beckett's own game: they are his quotation, and he only says what needed to be said at the time, and so he wrote it, whether people would catch on or not, whether they would label it absurdism or not. If you were to take every line of this play and utter it aloud, very slowly, word by word like a robot in a very monotone fashion, you would probably capture the idea. If it's any indication, he wrote everything in French first--his second language--and then translated it in to English, just so it can be simple. I don't assume, of course, that this work should be cherished simply because it's an exercise in simplicity. But I submit that it should be cherished because it's a genuine, themeless--somehow--masterpiece about two people waiting for the most unimportant, unknown thing that may or may not ever come. It is frequently hilarious and constantly frivolous, but somehow, it manages to charm. It is like one of those songs that you can listen to over and over again, and it has no lyrics, and no meaning--as far as you know--but it still makes you feel good under glaring adversity.

The first time I picked it up I read 20 pages and put it down, unable to understand a thing. The second time I read half the book and gave up. Because I heard so much about it, I tried again and the third time I loved it. It's an incredible mix of sad hopelessness and almost slapstick style humor, at times I laughed aloud. A frighteningly stark look at the human condition. From the first, almost every line of the play can be interpreted on at least 3 levels.One, on the shallow level of the daily lives of the two main characters, about the banal objects of their existence, their shoes, games, desires, and stories, etc.Two, on a deeper level, about the deeper meaning of their existence, the search for a frame of reference (Godot), the hopelessness, the hope that is always dangled in front of them, forcing them to stay in the cosmic game, yet never attaining the things hoped for.And on a third level, as 2 actors on a stage, wasting time, trying to think up lines to fill the time until the end of the play (note the part where one of the actors directs the other off stage to the restroom, to relieve himself), thus forcing the audience (or reader) into the exact position portrayed by the two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, to wait for meaning, for some sort of overall sense that will give rationale to their puzzling existence (or this puzzling play).Tragic, comic, sad, terrifying, poignant, and at times, oddly enough, hilarious. The best play I've read yet.

Ah... Waiting For Godot. Where do I even start?This play, one of the finest plays by the most important playwright to write in English (I know he originally wrote it in French) since Shakespeare (Feel free to argue with me) finds a outlet and a means to express the longings and emptiness of modern man. For all those who don't like it, get a friend and read it out loud together. That might change your mind.To all the reviews which seem to find that the whole "point" of the play can be found in the name Godot (which as a mixture of English and French could mean "Little God"), I think you are simplifying the play to a great extreme. One of my favorite quotes by Beckett on this subject was that if he had known who Godot was, he wouldn't have had to write the play. Frankly, all of you trying to find "meaning" or solution to the play are looking in the wrong places. Which isn't to say there isn't a lot there. Juggle it all round in your head, but don't ever really grab on to something as the key: you're probably wrong.To the review who complained that Beckett didn't adequately give the time period or location for his play, I argue that he did: "A country road. A tree. Evening." That is all you need, and according to the man himself, all that should be on stage, scenery-wise.A Civil War play? You must be joking.But anyway, to summarize, Beckett finished what Hemingway began: distilling the language of literature into a tangible, true format with which we can truly explore the nature of human existence. Centuries from now they will remember Hemingway, Joyce, and Beckett when they talk about 20th century literature.So there.