Meet Samuel Beckett With Richard Wilson 2015 Manufacturing Intellect Princeton University Library Playing the Spectator While Waiting For Godot, Kimberly Bohman-Kalaja, The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 68, No. 1-2 Winter 2007,
Princeton University Library Publishers.
Discuss the use of repetition and doubling as dramatic devices in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
Or
Bring out the significance of the stage setting in Waiting for Godot or in Look Back in Anger.
Or
Discuss the theatre of the absurd and connect it to some of its social and philosophical antecedents.
That postmodernist Irish tragicomical Waiting For Godot is a poetic drama of the Anglo-Franco absurdist tradition that evades both the meaning of life and purpose and that of memory and
jurisdiction as envisioned by the vaudeville stock buffoon archetypal everyday humanity country bumpkins and fool-like jester tramps.
These protagonists Vladimir and Estragon’s histrionic
rhetorics “Yesterday’s evening it was black and bare. Now it’s covered in leaves” and “It must be the spring” respectively delineate the trajectory of stage directions behind the stage and
alleyways of a baffling generation of scholarly drama critics. Time is a patterning of memories in a narrative sequence as observable by these characters’ microcosmic natural world amidst blasted
heaths and ruined countryside. Representations of recurrent imageries associated with boots and hats, gastric inflammation, and pouches of belching bear resemblance to outfit wardrobe and food
crises prevalence of French resistance of the post world war epoch.
Emissary’s implication of Godot’s continual dismissal is lachrymose news to the readers of existentialism and nihilism. After all Pozzo’s declarative “Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time?” postulates that the natural world is a purgatory without a promissory note of salvation as envisioned by these tramplike vagabonds; they cannot reminisce on past memories and
are thus entwined within this gossamery of past and present spatiotemporality to be certain about who they are, where they are and why they are like rhetorical questions.
Estragon’s and Vladimir’s hanging upon the tree is a figurative trope of melodramatic hyperbolism that concerns finding meaning within a meaningless world. Lucky’s beastly burdensome stoicism [lifting of
sand bags every now and then and then dragging them down to relift them] subjective to Pozzo’s tyrannical regime upon the behest of mindless and purposeless errand is symbolic of power
dynamics concerning humanity’s enslavement to chasmic maze.
Lucky being deafened and Pozzo being blind incriminate subversion of power polity through the inversion of power dynamics, through banishment of colonial hegemony and thus proclaim emancipation to freedom by resistance and rebellion. That literature laureate absurdist and existentialist playwright Samuel Beckett crafts electrifying and spellbinding aural specks of allegorical enchantment in canonizing the fiction of absurdist poetic drama. After all, this is an allegory of the human condition for eternity as if we are cataclysmically falling with the rolling boulders from the cliff.
Fatalistically these tramp protagonists are eternalized for waiting and Beckett has transformed the destitution of mankind into exaltation through Lucky’s personae: “He’s Lucky to have no more expectations.” Furthermore, the polar binaries between the powerful Pozzo and the powerless Lucky, Estragon, and Vladimir insinuate extended metaphors of the Cold War, the French Resistance, and the Irish rebellious spirits of the nationalist freedom movement.
“Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! Let us do something while we have a chance.” Vladimir’s speech is evoked in implication of salvaging the quagmire of Pozzo and Lucky’s funebrial crisis. Angst and pangst of existentialist crisis has been translated to the traumatic psyche of these priggish and prudential beings. However the stage directions of being stationary connotes their dwarfish dormancy and alienated stagnation. That the pointlessness of existence is implicated in salvation being awaited by external force and that self is incapable of self-knowledge. In cloak and dagger connotations of Estragon and Vladimir symbolically represents
ego and id while Pozzo and Lucky symbolically represents superego.
As a result these characters are alter egos or shadows or persona soul image of themselves weaved by the gossamery of existentialist crisis. In this context, Lucky is the shadow of the superego of the egocentric Pozzo whose emotion becomes repressed pouring forth of the unconscious state through monologue.
Estragon is feminized with sensitive, irrational and poetic traits while Vladimir is masculinized with rational, contemplative and intellectual traits. Godot is a political satirical idiom of modern popular culture symbolic of the gothic monsterish figure of loathsome whangdoodle as dracula macabre. Pathos of nothingness is a dire catharsis by the crucial existentialists’ plight engendering from being sublime to travesty within universalistic spatiotemporality by the indication of “A country road”. “A tree”. “Evening”.
Domineering colonizer master Pozzo with his whip and the subservient colonized subaltern Lucky’s servility in burdensome stoical endurance is the inversion of the amnesty between
Estragon and Vladimir despite these individualists’ nihilistic despair with insurmountable frustrations. Antiphrasis of stage directions hint to “They do not move” despite speech acts of voluntary action: “Let’s us go” furthermore metaphorically suggestive of philosophical
pessimism as embodied silence, stasis, absence and negation.
Becket’s poignant revelatory envisioning from Biblical allusions point out that “Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved; do not presume, one of the thieves was damned.” Although the tragicomedy lacks female reproductive machinery however, the tree is symbolic of that utopian hope in a world of futility.
Frugal and mundane existence in a characteristic bleak landscape in expectation and anticipation of the messianic Saviour Christ through the mediation of the emissarial convoy exhibit the maudlin encumbrance of these stock characters like vaudeville fools and country bumpkins in mainstream absurdist realism. “I’ll never forget this carrot. The more you eat, the worst it gets. I’ll get used to the muck as I go along.”
These dialects are philosophical prompts propounded by the childish, materialistic, feminist, poetic, melodramatic Estragon and rational intellectualist wimpy guffaw of Vladimir contrasting differences of their outlook in life. The essence of struggling and wriggling is both bogus and vague as contemplated by these speculative skeptical states of affairs. Godot might be a satirical human condition of both waiting and achievement throughout Christmas, birthday celebration, job prospect, love of the life, funeral anniversary and so forth.
Sadomasochism of Pozzo and Lucky are allegorically satirized by brevity of intertextual allusions that mirrors habitual distraction and interruption that embodies Didi and Gogo’s world of nihilistic pessimism, stasis and repetition, skepticism and ambiguity.
Their forlorn and obscuring of train of thoughts and chain of events, forgotten memories, obliviousness of dreams, discarding of dialogues and abandonment of suicide attempts are verily brought to the foray of this justification. Language has lost the essence of the core of communication by the farrago of charlatantry and buffoonery in Lucky’s monologue. Audiences would walk out by the off stage characters’ frustration and oppression after all in correspondence with the effect of defamiliarization. Lucky isolated island of retreat from dialogism critiques the purgatorial nightmare pestering into the
infested microcosmic existence of these slapstick vaudeville country bumpkins tramps. Lucky is the symbolic thinktank Beckettian institution which dismantles establishment of linguistic games
and sheds light on the furthering of ideas into the dialogic proximity.
After being traumatized and tortured by these existentialist characters, Lucky is doomed into thinking and functioning as
Pozzo’s porter.
Further References Youtube Podcasts and Documentary Films and Lecture Presentations
Seminary Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Professor Dr. Nick Mount, Department of English, University of Toronto The Meaning of Godot, Professor Dr. David Pattie, Department of Drama and Theatre, University of Birmingham Theatre and Language: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Professor Dr. Belinda Jack, Gresham Professor of Rhetoric, Gresham College, London, UK
Cambridge PhDcasts John Gallagher presents Any Wimbush’s Samuel Beckett and Quietism
Ian McKellen Discusses “Waiting For Godot” Staging Shakespeare