Guy Tiphane
Prof. Davaran
EN 216
June 21, 2002

From Waiting for Godot to Endgame: an Exploration in Time

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest —
I too awaited the expected guest.
                        T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

On his second coming to the stage of Waiting for Godot, Pozzo, the master figure, is blind.  Vladimir recognizes him, and Estragon refers to Tiresias, the blind soothsayer of Thebes:

Pozzo:        Who are you?

Vladimir: Do you not recognize us?

Pozzo:        I am blind.

                     Silence.

Estragon:   Perhaps he can see into the future.

The future is Beckett’s play Endgame, where the character of Hamm is also blind and the master, obsessed with coming to an end.  Unlike Tiresias, however, Hamm cannot see into the future and decide when the end is going to come.  But a common thread between the two plays is the notion of time, which the blind Pozzo apparently lost:

Vladimir: But no later than yesterday—

Pozzo:        (violently)  Don’t question me!  The blind have no notion of time.  The things of time are hidden from them too.

This degradation of time started to happen in Act I when Pozzo lost his watch.  Prior to that he was a modern man obsessed with checking his watch, a watch he inherited from his grandfather.  When Vladimir declares that “Time has stopped,” Pozzo replies “Whatever you like, but not that,” and Estragon tells him “Everything seems black to him to-day,” almost as a predicament to Pozzo’s coming blindness.

The blind Pozzo cannot remember meeting Vladimir and Estragon the day before, their only hope to confirm that today is today and yesterday was the day before:

Vladimir: We met yesterday.  (Silence)  Do you not remember?

Pozzo:        I don’t remember having met anyone yesterday.  But to-morrow I won’t remember having met anyone to-day.  So don’t count on me to enlighten you.

But perhaps more important is that he wants to confirm it is evening, which Vladimir and Estragon are unable to.  In Endgame, Hamm confirms it: “It’s the end of the day like any other day,” but may also suggest that there are no more days as we know them.

Lucky’s only speech in Waiting for Godot could almost be prophetic in the treatment of time, with its several instances of “time will tell,” “left unfinished,” and “concurrently simultaneously.”  Time does tell, when Pozzo makes his final response to Vladimir:

Vladimir: Dumb!  Since when?

Pozzo:        (suddenly furious)  Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time!  It’s abominable!  When!  When!  One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day shall we die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you?  (Calmer)  They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.

But in Endgame, Clov opens the play with “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished,” a theme repeated at the end by Hamm.  They are “left unfinished” as Lucky said they would be.

Pozzo’s lost watch reappears in Endgame as an alarm clock “to wake the dead.”  Although writing about another genre, the novel, Margaret Atwood wrote: “once you’ve got clocks, you’ve got death and dead people, because time, as we know, runs on, and then it runs out, and dead people are situated outside of time, whereas living people are still immersed in it.”[1]  While listening for Pozzo’s watch, Estragon suggests that “perhaps it has stopped,” leaving us wondering if he means the watch or Pozzo’s heart.  To Clov’s suggestion that he saw his heart last night, Hamm replies: “No, it was living.”

In Endgame, Clov’s clock is the whistle blown by Hamm.  Clov spends his time in his kitchen staring at the wall, waiting for the whistle.  The two time devices blend in Clov’s dichotomous scheme to tell whether he is dead or gone:  “You whistle me.  I don’t come.  The alarm rings.  I’m gone.  It doesn’t ring.  I’m dead.”  At the end of the play, as Clov gets ready to leave, we cannot know whether the clock will ring or not.

Unable to tell time in Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon’s only hope would be to encounter someone who could confirm that yesterday was yesterday.  Instead, neither Pozzo nor the messenger boy can confirm they have ever met them.  Their only hope is to meet Godot tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, or whatever other day there is to come.  Unlike Waiting for Godot, Endgame has no tomorrow.  We are left with attempts at finishing Hamm’s chronicle, but it has no end.  Clov takes the alarm clock from the wall and sets it on Nagg’s ashbin, perhaps in the hope it will wake the dead.  In his final words, Hamm says:  “Moments for nothing, now as always, time was never and time is over, reckoning closed and story ended.”  Hamm throws the whistle away, to end the killing of time.


[1] M. Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, Cambridge University Press, 2002.