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 emptiness present in the day-to-day life of human beings, so much so that the explanation baffles. It extensively explores the mystery of existence, the unnamed fear and anxiety of the human subconscious mind that defies 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 a dream situation exists and the sequence of events is unrelated. Like real life events, there is a movement from picture to picture through association. So it doesn’t follow the pattern of logic and the only logic lies in associative image connections. When waiting for Godot, the images convey boredom, despair, boredom, helplessness of waiting. The images tend to get more and more desperate as the play progresses (mainly in the second act). The work captures the psychological state of waiting that worsens during the course of the play. 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 homeless men named Vladimir and Estragon meet on a country lane 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 come that day, but surely tomorrow. They agree to go but they are not going anywhere. 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 is the words that are repeated frequently and quite significantly in the work. Estragon expresses them for the first time at the beginning and Vladimir expands their meaning even more in the same scene when he says: “I am beginning to accept that opinion. All my life I have tried to take it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you have not tried yet. Everything. And I resumed the Fight. ” Then the action is assumed at first to be useless. Homeless people are pretty sure of the futility of the action and play silly games just to pass the time and it is here that elements of antics comedy are poured into the play. Inaction becomes theatrical action. Nothing happens twice in the work, waiting is doing nothing and something at the same time. Waiting is a dramatized experience and there is enough hint of this in the title of the play itself, inaction is a dramatic action in Waiting for Godot.
Therefore, the apparent theme of the play is waiting for Vladimir and Estragon to do throughout the two acts. It is over time that the play becomes obsessed and emphasizes that all action is useless, including waiting, and that is the theme of the play. The human condition is wonderfully explored in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Both acts are similar and the first act is repeated in the second with only change in the dialogue and 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 appear the next day and not on this particular night. Thus, the wait is endless for the vagrants waiting for Godot, who is endlessly promising his elusive arrival. Boredom is deliberately introduced to create tension in the work.
Homeless people wait for a person for their probable salvation and while they wait, homeless people feel the passage of time that constantly submits everything to change. But the more things change, the more they remain the same “That is the terrible stability of the world: as Pozzo said” the tears of the world 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 the man awaits salvation Godot represents that refuge for the two vagabonds of the play.
Homeless people here are not sure if they have come to the right place or even the right day. This is the basic human condition in which every day seems the same and it is difficult to distinguish between them. Vladimir and Estragon’s miserable condition regarding the turmoil of the day is a testament to this. The homeless have no rights, but they have gotten rid of them, although there is no doubt that they are tied up. 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: “Note that it could easily have been in his shoes and he in mine.” On a broader level, Pozzo and Lucky are master and slave representing the body and mind.
The play deals primarily with the mystery, the inexplicable enigma 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 homeless during their wait. Beckett has not recounted the identity of Godot in the play and it is left as the mystery and whether Godot represents God is a debatable issue, but surely he is the one who is considered by the vagabonds for their probable salvation. Godot, however, promises them that they will appear, but his assurance was as vague as the vagabonds’ prayer for him.
There is a total absence of information about the personal antecedents of the four characters that add to the mysterious atmosphere of the work that seeks to enunciate the illogical and absurd human condition, repetitive by nature. Unspoken words and pauses are more meaningful than explicit things said in the play. It has been said that “silence is poured into this game water on a sinking ship”. The two tramps may seem strange to us, but they present us with the modern nonsense of life, what we are all caught up in, 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 outside help to give our lives meaning.
The Godot, who does not appear in the entire work, represents the outside world and expects unquestionable submission, otherwise the vagrants will be punished for him. According to Beckett, “there is nothing to express, nothing to express, no power to express, no desire to express, along with the obligation to express.” Godot is like any other miniature god for whom men wait with 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 mirrored room from which attempts to escape only make the prisoner look comical.