Guy Tiphane
Dr. Davaran
EN 216
June 18, 2002
Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot
1953. Waiting for Godot is produced in Paris and becomes one of the most significant plays of modern theatre. As Martin Esslin says in his book The Theatre of the Absurd: “And against all expectations, the strange tragic farce, in which nothing happens and which had been scorned as undramatic by a number of managements, became one of the greatest successes of the post-war theatre.”[1] In the few years that followed, Waiting for Godot had been translated into more than twenty languages and performed before millions of spectators. The play touched the sensitivities of an audience slowly recovering from the horror and the cruelty of World War II. This was a time when the existentialist views of Sartre haunted the disillusioned public with the fact that one cannot evade what one is.
Act I. A
country road. A tree. Evening.
Such is the stage for Waiting for Godot. Two friends find each other in two acts repeating almost the same act of waiting. They try to converse and to avoid thinking, but uncover deep thoughts and feelings. In each act, they encounter two men in a master-slave relationship, and they seem to touch all levels of humanity. The characters remember less than the audience when they meet again in Act II, which is puzzling to the audience who would want to react in their place.
Vladimir and Estragon meet again. Estragon is preoccupied with taking his boots off, Vladimir with their condition. The hurting of the boots is transmitted to Vladimir’s hat, which seems to influence his discourse, veering into randomness until it finds a religious theme:
Vladimir: Suppose we repented.
Estragon: Repented what?
Vladimir: Oh … (He reflects) We wouldn’t have to go into the details.
Estragon: Our being born?
Estragon plays the straight man who is not really interested in Vladimir’s exposé of how only one evangelist reported the story of the two thieves crucified with Jesus:
Vladimir: But one of the four says that one of the two was saved.
Estragon: Well? They don’t agree and that’s all there is to it.
Estragon wants to go away but does not move. We learn of their waiting first when Estragon surveys the scene:
Estragon: Charming spot. (He turns, advances to front, halts facing auditorium.) Inspiring prospects. (He turns to Vladimir.) Let’s go.
And the play’s refrain[2] comes up for the first time:
Estragon: Let’s go.
Vladimir: We can’t.
Estragon: Why not?
Vladimir: We’re waiting for Godot.
Estragon: Ah!
We will hear this refrain six times in the play, in addition to several other allusions to waiting, with a final variant:
Estragon: O yes, let’s go far away from here.
Vladimir: We can’t.
Estragon: Why not?
Vladimir: We have to come back to-morrow.
Estragon: What for?
Vladimir: To wait for Godot.
You may have guessed that the theme of the play is waiting, and that the tableaus between the refrains make us reflect on different aspects of the human condition. It is never clear who Godot is, and why he has such power over them to cause them to wait for him. The two often contemplate suicide, but always find good arguments against it:
Estragon: Let’s hang ourselves immediately!
Vladimir: From a bough? (They go towards the tree) I wouldn’t trust it.
But someone comes, and it is not Godot. Lucky, loaded with a bag, a stool, a picnic basket, and a coat, has a rope around his neck. At the end of the long rope is Pozzo who also carries a whip. Vladimir and Estragon are submissive and evasive with the authoritative Pozzo, and automatically build an inferior view of Lucky:
Vladimir: A trifle effeminate.
Estragon: Look at the slobber.
Vladimir: It’s inevitable.
Estragon: Look at the slaver.
Vladimir: Perhaps he’s a halfwit.
Estragon: A cretin.
In a complete reversal, Vladimir eventually protests:
Vladimir: (exploding) It’s a scandal!
Silence. Flabbergasted, Estragon
stops gnawing, looks at Pozzo and Vladimir in turn. Pozzo outwardly calm.
Vladimir embarrassed.
Pozzo: (to Vladimir) Are you alluding to anything in particular?
Vladimir: (stutteringly resolute) To treat a man… (gesture towards Lucky) … like that … I think that … no … a human being … no … it’s a scandal!
The exchange heats up and Vladimir is no longer polite with Pozzo, who tells them that he will go to the market to sell Lucky. For many lines thereafter, Vladimir only repeats:
Vladimir: You want to get rid of him?
Pozzo complains about his own condition in an attempt to reverse the sympathy. Vladimir responds ironically with allusions to crucifixion, reminiscent of Nazi rhetoric:
Pozzo: (groaning,
clutching his head) I can’t bear it
… any longer … the way it goes on … you’ve no idea … it’s terrible … he must go
… (he waves his arms) … I’m
going mad … (he collapses, his head in his hands) … I can’t bear it …
any longer …
Silence. All look at Pozzo.
Vladimir: He can’t bear it.
Estragon: Any longer.
Vladimir: He’s going mad.
Estragon: It’s terrible.
Vladimir: (to Lucky) How dare you! It’s abominable! Such a good master! Crucify him like that! After so many years! Really!
Pozzo then withdraws his statement, showing how easily he could manipulate his audience. Vladimir withdraws, goes offstage presumably to go to the bathroom, while Estragon maintains the small talk with Pozzo. Vladimir’s lines then have fatalistic tones, expressing annoyance as in “Will night never come?” and “Time has stopped.”
They are about to part when Pozzo hints that Lucky can think, a perspective that raises Vladimir’s curiosity. A complex procedure ends with putting Lucky’s hat on his head to cause him to utter his long and incomprehensible monologue.
Vladimir, Estragon, and Pozzo silence Lucky by taking his hat off. Pozzo and Lucky leave the stage for Vladimir and Estragon to resume their waiting. A boy, messenger of Godot, comes to them to announce that Mr. Godot will not come today. The moon rises, in a poetic relief to the difficult day of Act I.
Estragon: Well, shall we go?
Vladimir: Yes,
let’s go.
They do not move.
Intermission. While we gather to the bar for a gin and tonic, we may wonder what this first act was all about. My guess is that we should pay a lot of attention to the dynamics between the characters, their reactions to what they see and hear while waiting for Godot who does not come. It seems to be like real life: while we wait for tomorrow to come, we try to entertain ourselves to kill time, and ignore the lack of dignity around us. We choose to be passive with figures of authority, and disturbingly active with the inferior and the oppressed… The lights are flashing: Act II is about to start.
Act II. Next
day. Same time. Same place.
Vladimir, in a good mood, meets Estragon again and gets both to agree that they are happy:
Vladimir: Say, I am happy.
Estragon: I am happy.
Vladimir: So am I.
Estragon: So am I.
Vladimir: We are happy.
Estragon: We are happy. (Silence) What do we do now, now that we are happy?
Vladimir: Wait
for Godot. (Estragon groans. Silence) Things have changed here since yesterday.
And indeed something has changed: the tree now has 4 or 5 leaves, but Vladimir does not even mention that when he points at the tree for Estragon, who has forgotten everything from the day before. Vladimir will notice the leaves later in the act: did he forget about the tree? Memory and thinking becomes the subject of the conversation, which becomes a poetic memorial:
Estragon: All the dead voices.
Vladimir: They make a noise like wings.
Estragon: Like leaves.
Vladimir: Like sand.
Estragon: Like
leaves.
Silence.
Vladimir: They all speak at once.
Estragon: Each one
to itself.
Silence.
Vladimir: Rather they whisper.
Estragon: They rustle.
Vladimir: They murmur.
Estragon: They
rustle.
Silence.
Vladimir: What do they say?
Estragon: They talk about their lives.
Vladimir: To have lived is not enough for them.
Estragon: They have to talk about it.
Vladimir: To be dead is not enough for them.
Estragon: It is not
sufficient.
Silence.
Vladimir: They make a noise like feathers.
Estragon: Like leaves.
Vladimir: Like ashes.
Estragon: Like
leaves.
Long Silence.
Allusions to the dead continue as they accidentally think. It is as if they were having a common vision of the Holocaust:
Vladimir: Where are all these corpses from?
Estragon: These skeletons.
Then once again they resume their conversation about the tree, carrots, radishes, and turnips to let time pass.
Vladimir: This is becoming insignificant.
Estragon: Not enough.
Finding Lucky’s hat, the proof that they were in the same place yesterday, Vladimir and Estragon engage in a silent exchange of the three hats until Lucky’s hat ends on Vladimir’s head. Follows a moment of madness where Estragon thinks Godot is coming from everywhere, and then they abuse each other until Estragon utters the ultimate insult:
Estragon: (with finality) Crritic!
Vladimir: Oh!
He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.
Pozzo and Lucky return to the stage, changed: the rope is short, Pozzo is blind, they fall on each other and Pozzo calls for help. Vladimir and Estragon consider beating Lucky in retaliation for the kick in Act I, and helping Pozzo in consideration for the money he offers. They philosophize on the human response to cries of help. As if to test if he is still Pozzo, they try calling him “Abel” and “Cain”, to which he responds with cries for help. Estragon concludes that “He’s all humanity.” Interpret as you wish, whether he means that all humanity is crying for help, or it is being both Cain and Abel, the murderous brother and his victim. They finally help Pozzo up, who has lost all notion of time and leaves furious that he is asked since when Lucky became dumb. Estragon contracts the refrain into a monologue (“Let’s go. We can’t. Ah!”) and wonders if Pozzo was not Godot after all. Vladimir also wonders:
Vladimir: Was I
sleeping, while the others suffered? Am
I sleeping now? To-morrow, when I wake,
or think I do, what shall I say of to-day?
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. But in all that what
truth will there be?
(Estragon, having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing off
again. Vladimir looks at him) He’ll know nothing. He’ll tell me about the blows he received
and I’ll give him a carrot. (Pause)
Astride of a grave and a difficult birth.
Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the
forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He
listens) But habit is a great
deadener. (He looks again at
Estragon) At me too someone is
looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him
sleep on. (Pause) I can’t go on! (Pause) What have
I said?
The boy messenger comes again, also with no recollection of seeing them the day before, to tell them that Mr Godot will not come today. They cannot drop Godot, they cannot hang themselves, and the play ends:
Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?
Estragon: Yes,
let’s go.
They do not move.
The Theatre of the Absurd
Although one could easily argue that the play defined a style of its own, Esslin labeled Beckett’s plays as Theatre of the Absurd along with the plays of other contemporaries, most notably Eugène Ionesco. Esslin’s criteria for the classification come from the use and the fusion of old traditions of the theatre to express contemporary issues. The traditions are:
There was no group or movement of the Theatre of the Absurd, but there are enough similarities between the plays and the authors that we like to put them together. The plays also differentiate themselves clearly from the plays surrounding them in the century. In that landscape, Waiting for Godot has all the qualities of the stake in the ground.