Waiting for Godot

What is Waiting for Godot?

Waiting for Godot is a play written by Samuel Beckett in the contemporary age. it belongs to the theatre of the absurd, a form of theatre where there is a complete abandonment of logical construction, of rational linking of ideas, alongside with the concept of waiting and death.

Themes

Although the main theme of the play is the theme of waiting without knowing what or why, there are other important themes in the play:

• Sterility = absence of women on the stage
• Physical and psychological deterioration = symbolised by Estragon’s ailing feet, Vladimir’s problems with urination and Pozzo and Lucky turning dumb and deaf
• The search for identity = underlined by the character’s different nicknames
• Memory = everyone has difficulties in remembering anything at all
• Mutual Dependence = underlined by the frequent separations and reunion of the two protagonists
• Monotony of life = repetitive structure of the play and the characters’ compulsion to repeat
• Incommunicability = suggests suffering
• Existential dismay
• comic entertainment
• Inability to act
• Uncertainty = even time and place are uncertain
• Meta-theatre = they interact with the audience itself

Style and Language

The language used by Beckett is both literary and colloquial, the vocabulary is simple and it belongs to Standard English. He also makes it absurd and purposeless by using devices such as:

• Half Statements
• Misunderstanding
• repetitions
• double meanings
• monologues
• trite sentences

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. But habit is a great deadener.

Waiting for Godot

This was Waiting for Godot! 😉

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