Samuel Beckett, considered one of the leading playwrights of modern times, created some of the rare masterpieces and Waiting for Godot is no exception. The work explores the lack of purpose and the emptiness present in the day-to-day of human life, so much so that the explanation is baffling. It extensively explores the mystery of existence, the unknown fear and anxiety of the human subconscious mind that defy rationality.
The play belongs to the genre of Theater of the Absurd which is basically Parisian in nature. The old theatrical conventions are replaced by the absurd. Usually there is a dream situation and the sequence of events is unrelated. Like real life events, there is a movement from image to image through association. So it doesn’t follow the pattern of logic and the only logic lies in the associative connections of the images. In Godot’s waiting, the images convey boredom, desperation, boredom, the impotence of waiting. The images tend to become more and more desperate as the play progresses (mainly in the second act). In the work, a psychological state of expectation is reflected that worsens during the course of the work. The action is mechanical.
It is a work quite different from the conventional ones and it does not have a story to tell us. Two wanderers named Vladimir and Estragon meet on a country road with a bare tree and a mound in the background. They wait incessantly for someone named Godot who does not appear to greet them. At the end of both acts, a messenger boy informs them that Godot will not be coming that day, but surely tomorrow. They agree to go but go nowhere. In both acts, a master (Pozzo) and a slave (Lucky) pass by while the tramps wait. Thus, in both acts nothing really happens and there is nothing to do. Everything is static in the work and the work represents rather a static human condition.
Nothing to do are the words that are repeated frequently and quite significantly in the work. Estragon expresses them for the first time at the beginning and Vladimir amplifies their meaning in the same scene when he says: “I’m beginning to accept that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to shake it off, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t tried everything yet.” And I resumed the Fight”. So the action is supposed at first to be futile. The drifters are pretty sure of the futility of the action and play silly games just to pass the time and this is where the elements of slapstick comedy pour into the play. Inaction is transformed into theatrical action. Nothing happens twice in the work, waiting is doing nothing and something at the same time. Waiting is dramatized experience and there is enough clue for this in the title of the work itself, inaction is dramatic action in Waiting for Godot.
Thus, the apparent theme of the play is waiting for what Vladimir and Estragon do throughout the two acts. It is over time that the work becomes obsessed and emphasizes that all action is futile, including waiting, and that is the theme of the work. The human condition is wonderfully explored in Beckett’s work in Waiting for Godot. Both acts are similar and the first act is repeated in the second with only changes in the dialogue and the sequence of events, Vladimir and Estragon meet Pozzo and Lucky, the same couple in different circumstances. In both acts, Pozzo and Lucky, the master and the slave remain tied while the tramps continue to wait for Godot. Both acts begin in the afternoon and end with nightfall and end with the arrival of a messenger that Godot will present the next day and not on this particular night. Thus, the wait is endless for the wanderers awaiting Godot, who endlessly promises his elusive arrival. Boredom is deliberately introduced to create tension in the play.
The homeless are waiting for a person for their probable salvation and while waiting, the homeless feel the passage of time that constantly changes everything. But the more things change, the more they remain the same “That is the terrible stability of the world: as Pozzo said “the world’s tears are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to cry in another place, another stops.” “One day is like another and when we die we may never have existed.” Between birth and death, the light shines only for an instant, but man waits salvation Godot represents that refuge for the two vagabonds of the work.
The wanderers here aren’t sure if they’ve come to the right place or even the right day. This is the basic human condition where every day looks the same and it’s hard to distinguish between them. The wretched condition of Vladimir and Estragon in regard to the confusion of the day is a testament to this. The vagabonds have no rights but they have got rid of them, although it is not that they are tied down. Uncertainty is present throughout the work. Even the possibility of man being saved by Christ depends on chance, and there is an element of chance in human destiny. Pozzo says of Lucky: “Notice that I could easily have been in his place and he in mine.” On a larger level, Pozzo and Lucky are master and slave representing the body and the mind.
The play deals primarily with the mystery and unexplained puzzle and purposelessness of human life, the anxiety and despair that comes with the human condition. It is this concern that is reflected in the moods of the vagabonds throughout their wait. Beckett has not said Godot’s identity in the play and it is left as a mystery and whether Godot represents God is a debatable issue, but surely it is he who is sought by the wanderers for his likely salvation. Although Godot promises them that they will appear, but his assurance was as vague as the prayer of the wanderers.
There is a complete absence of information about the personal backgrounds of the four characters which adds to the mysterious atmosphere in the play which seeks to affirm the illogicality and absurdity of the repetitive nature of the human condition. The unspoken words and pauses are more significant than the explicit things said in the play. It has been said that “silence pours into this play of water on a sinking ship.” The two tramps may seem strange to us, but they introduce us to the meaninglessness of modern life in which we are all trapped, a habit from which there is no escape. Even the empty stage here acts as a metaphor for life, we are the ones who have to fill it and we should not wait for external help to invest meaning in our lives.
The Godot who does not appear in the entire play represents the outside world and expects unquestioning submission, otherwise the vagabonds will be punished by him. According to Beckett, “there is nothing to express, nothing to express with, no power to express, no desire to express, together with an obligation to express”. Godot is like any other miniature god that men wait in hope and fear to solve their problem and make sense of their meaningless lives, and for whose sake they sacrifice the only real gift they have, their free will. In short, the futility of waiting symbolizes the futility of human life that is trapped in a better world compared to a hall of mirrors from which escape attempts only make the prisoner look comical.