What Makes Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ a Tragicomedy?
Waiting for Godot (first translated into English in 1953) by Samuel Beckett is considered one of the greatest plays of the twentieth century or post-World War II theatre. The two protagonists of the play are two men—Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo)—situated in the middle of nowhere. They are waiting for a third—Godot. Twice in the play, they meet two other men, Pozzo and Lucky. Twice in the play, a boy messenger arrives to announce a postponement in Godot’s arrival till tomorrow.
This play where “nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes”—as Estragon remarks in Act One—has often left its audiences and readers perplexed. As Mary Bryden writes in the Preface to the Faber and Faber edition,
Godot forces “a reconsideration of what theatre was and what it could be.”
Beckett did leave some clues on what his play could be, though. When he translated the play from French to English, he added the subtitle—“a tragicomedy in two acts.” So, what makes this play a tragicomedy?
The Theatre of the Absurd
Scholar and critic Martin Esslin categorises Beckett’s plays under the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’—a genre that reflects “the attitude most genuinely representative of our own time [post-World War II].” Quoting one of Eugène Ionesco’s essays on Franz Kafka, Esslin writes that absurd is “that which is devoid of purpose… man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.”
Esslin ascribes two main characteristics to the Theatre of the Absurd. The first is “an integration between the subject-matter and form.” Esslin explains,
“…the Theatre of the Absurd strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought.”
Esslin also quotes Beckett’s essay on James Joyce’s Work in Progress wherein Beckett writes that the form, structure, and mood of an artistic statement cannot be separated from its meaning “the work of art as a whole is its meaning” (original emphasis).
The second is that the Theatre of the Absurd “tends toward a radical devaluation of language” to the extent that
“…what happens on the stage transcends, and often contradicts, the words spoken by the characters” (original emphases).
This unity between the content and the form in which it is expressed is significant in understanding Godot as a tragicomedy, as is the breakdown of language that is characteristic of this genre.
The Two Acts
Godot has no plot, neither a beginning nor an end, and no fully explained theme. The two acts almost mirror each other with minor variations in the sequence of events — variations that serve to emphasise “the essential sameness of the situation” (Esslin).
In Act Two, Vladimir reflects,
“Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably… habit is a great deadener.”
The inescapable state of ‘waiting’ that the protagonists are subjected to and the inescapable circularity of the play are also highlighted by Vladimir’s song about a dog who is beaten to death by a cook for stealing a crust of bread, at the beginning of Act Two.
Therefore, the play is a “strange tragic farce” (Esslin) in both structure and content — in which the “only surety is the renewability of waiting” (Bryden).
Vladimir says,
“Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come-”
The Two Protagonists
Vladimir is somewhat of a failed philosopher and Estragon is, by his confession, a failed poet. The desperate condition of these two tramps at the margins of society is apparent — in Estragon’s hunger in the carrots and turnips episode (“Make it last, that’s the end of them,” says Vladimir), in Vladimir’s pathos-heavy “I felt lonely” and “You’re my only hope”, and in numerous other instances in the play.
These characters are almost mechanical puppets, indulged in incoherent babblings and inconsequential actions. The contradiction between word and action — the breakdown of language — is nowhere more apparent than at the end of the two acts.
Act One ends:
ESTRAGON: Well, shall we go?
VLADIMIR: Yes, let’s go.
[They do not move.]
Act Two ends with the same lines but spoken by the characters in reversed order — they decide to go but they don’t move.
Therefore, the tragic condition of the two protagonists is essentially absurd. In ‘An Absurd Reasoning’ (published alongside ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ in this edition), Albert Camus writes,
“The divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.”
This condition is not limited to the individual but is universalised in Beckett’s play. In Act Two, Vladimir says,
“But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind if us…”
Waiting for Godot as a Tragedy
In Modern Tragedy (1966), Raymond Williams writes that Beckett’s Godot “presents a total condition of man”, which is absolute, but as “they [Vladimir and Estragon] stay together, with nothing to go for and nothing but disappointment to wait for, yet staying together, an old and deep tragic rhythm is recovered.”
Williams attempts to “describe the relations and connections” between tragedy as a literary tradition and tragedy as an immediate experience in the modern world (twentieth century and post-World War II). He regards Godot as “the most remarkable example” of this.
Waiting for Godot as a Tragicomedy
However, Godot is scarcely a pure tragedy. Besides the playwright pronouncing it a ‘tragicomedy’, the characters themselves lay claim to popular comic traditions and forms — the pantomime, the circus, and the English music hall.
In Act One, they converse:
VLADIMIR: Charming evening we’re having.
[…]
ESTRAGON: It’s awful.
VLADIMIR: Worse than the pantomime.
ESTRAGON: The circus.
VLADIMIR: The music-hall.
Like tragedy, comedy can be found in both the play’s form and content. A great example of this is in the passing of the three hats in Act Two — the action is non-verbal and clownish; it is meant to induce laughter on stage as in a circus.
However, the circular movement — like Vladimir’s dog song — highlights the circular form of the play and the suffocating and inhibiting “renewability of waiting” (Bryden), bringing together the tragic and the comic.
The tragic and the comic are also brought together in characterisation. For instance, Estragon has stinking feet and Vladimir has a bladder problem. The dramatisation of these characteristics on stage, along with physical humour and the characters’ complementary personalities and unending cross-talk — both typical in the English music hall — are all meant to cause laughter.
However, nowhere does Beckett allow us to forget that the two characters are not the colourful clowns of a circus but existential tramps — trashed and colourless. Estragon is beaten every day by strangers, there is barely any food for them to share, and they consider hanging themselves just to escape “accursed time” (to borrow Pozzo’s words from Act Two).
Suicide, Time, and Hope
VLADIMIR: …What do we do now?
ESTRAGON: Wait.
VLADIMIR: Yes, but while waiting.
ESTRAGON: What about hanging ourselves?
VLADIMIR: Hmm. It’d give us an erection.
The disturbing act of suicide is presented in Act One as almost a comic diversion, an activity to pass the time, coupled with crude sexual humour.
But there is more to be said about suicide and hope in the play. Consider the following exchange at the end of Act Two:
VLADIMIR: We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow. [Pause.]
Unless Godot comes.
ESTRAGON: And if he comes?
VLADIMIR: We’ll be saved.
Esslin writes that the characters “live in hope: they wait for Godot, whose coming will bring the flow of time to a stop”.
On suicide, hope, and time, Camus mulls,
“One kills oneself because life is not worth living… Does its [life’s] absurdity require one to escape it through hope or suicide[?]…”
and
“We live on the future: ‘tomorrow’… He [man] belongs to time and, by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy.”
Finally, therefore, Godot leaves us with a question — “Nothing to be done” or is there something to be done?
