Waiting for Godot: A Summary, Meaning, & Analysis
The play Waiting for Godot was written after the War (1946/53) by the Irish Samuel Beckett, one of the most illustrious representatives of the (conventionally) known as the Theater of the Absurd.
The first definition of the Theater of the Absurd arose from Martin Esslin's 1961 work, The Theater of the Absurd, which characterizes it as an aesthetic and philosophical movement. The absurd represents and translates the impossibility of effective communication between men, resulting in a misunderstanding between modern man's pretensions of moral codes, religious and humanist, and the absence of meaning in his existence.
Beckett's concerns are with philosophical questions about the human condition, where Time (an essential factor for a historical understanding of the universe) exists only as an immobile and dead eternity and which has a meaning of the expression of the physical infirmity of bodies. The rest of humanity has lost its way and now finds itself incapable of understanding its existence. Therefore, Beckett's concern is not to show the absurdity of existence from social life but instead through the man's shock with himself, perceiving in his heart the perplexity of this encounter.
Waiting for Godot does not tell a story, on the contrary, explores a static situation. The place is deserted, with no colour. Only a tree is in the middle, and the light precedes the twilight. Two old homeless men, Vladimir and Estragon, are waiting for Godot. With this, they try to fill the waiting Time by talking to exhaustion because waiting is all the meaning of their lives. But nothing happens, and the atmosphere of emptiness and monotony is altered only by the entrance of Pozzo and Lucky (respectively master and enslaved person), who, after leaving, return to the void that surrounds the characters. And Godot, who the reader does not know who he is or what he is, does not come and never will. So to fill their desperate expectation, to deceive the boredom of empty and equal days, Vladimir and Estragon talk to each other even though they have nothing to say, they engage in futile discussions and rephrase the same questions (which are as frustrating as the attempts of answer), in order to fill the void of existence and to give at least the impression that they exist.
Life is made out of nothing. We have no answers. While science tries to explain the unreal, Beckett uses this unreal to define reality. The absolute truth of the human condition is that to what extent is the misery of life described in a text in which meaningless characters express the actual value of their lives? Vladimir and Estragon are the portraits of the characters who survived the postwar period, characters who had lost their condition of faith, and humans who were looking for answers to the chaos established in this space of Time.
Therefore, what is our role in this space of Time? Samuel Beckett discusses the problems of the war and the causes of the power struggle that has taken over Europe and consequently made millions of victims all over the world, besides marking in our history a bloody passage in which countless victims were surrounded without even having the right for a response. We are talking about the tortures, the suffering of these people, the experience lived by Beckett, and how this experience is reflected in his work Waiting for Godot seven years later. Vladimir and Estragon feel alone, abandoned, side by side, the separation for both is irremediable. Estragon tries all the Time to leave Vladimir but never does.
The characters of Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon, live with all this regret of Time. Their lives are summed up in this question of Beckett: There is no escape from Time. However much they seek to leave this confinement, they become imprisoned by it.
Tied or not to Godot, we can describe Time as the great master of these characters' lives. Time is the protagonist of this plot because this subject becomes a central character, which leads to questions and interrogates the theatrical text proposed by Samuel Beckett that analyzes the experience of the human condition.
We observe that Vladimir and Estragon are victims of this Time. Time leads the characters to expect a Godot that never arrives. Godot is the Time, omnipresent in the spectrum, as an idea. These characters try to do something or nothing and describe the passing of Time as a form of waiting or living (experience) of the temporal God.
Waiting for Godot is a genuine wait for Time to pass. The characters bored with this wait are assured by desire, and this desire keeps them on this journey even when they are bored. On the other hand, Godot is the desire for possession — a possession with a true sense of change, transformation, and new life to these characters imprisoned in this Time that becomes constant in the eyes of the reader. It is immense the difficulty they express in making a decision and acting, or perhaps in understanding the situation and its consequences. There is a vicious circle in their condition that prevents them from understanding Time as linear and organizing their present, past, and future actions. They are aware that they are involved in a temporal paradox and its response to this, but there are no demonstrations that, once freed from this circle, they know how to act otherwise.
VLADIMIR: Charming evening we’re having.
ESTRAGON: Unforgettable.
VLADIMIR: And it’s not over.
ESTRAGON: Apparently not.
VLADIMIR: It’s only beginning.
ESTRAGON: It’s awful.
VLADIMIR: Worse than the pantomime.
ESTRAGON: The circus.
VLADIMIR: The music-hall. Samuel Beckett. “Waiting for Godot”
If there is a will to act, motivated by the desire for change on the way to what has been lost, circumstances drag them to a reality contrary to what they desire. The result of this struggle is in the eternal permanence of this renunciation that will never be effective.
Beckett's theatre confronts us with an endless wait, a waiting that expresses nothing beyond itself, which has its consistency and, at the same Time, seems so close to life. This expectation is opaque without prior sense, discernible evolution, or direction. To deal with his opacity of existence, Beckett claimed to want theatre reduced to its means: word and play. Without a definite end to be achieved by theatrical play and without being able to achieve thereby a meaningful purpose by the word uttered on the scene, it's still playing-talking-waiting. Thus, the game is sustained while waiting until the game is over.
