Waiting for Godot: Futility in Existence and Language

Waiting for Godot, first premiered in Paris in 1953, is a play written by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. It features two main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, respectively referred to as Didi and Gogo. In the meantime, while waiting for a character Godot, Didi and Gogo meet two other characters, Pozzo and Lucky. After they have left, a boy comes to tell Didi and Gogo that Godot is not going to show up today, and so they leave. The next day resumes as usual, Pozzo and Lucky come about, and later the boy tells them that Godot will meet them tomorrow. The curtain closes to Vladimir and Estragon standing in the same space they have remained for the two acts.

Martin Esslin coined the term “The Theatre of the Absurd” to classify a style of play contemporary to Beckett, Waiting for Godot being a paradigm of this distinct theater. The conventionally classical plays, Esslin noted, are mere repetitions and reflections of an “accepted moral order”; the themes and symbols in those plays are readily recognized by their audiences. The plays in the Theatre of the Absurd, by going against the established moral motifs and expectations, theatrically alienates the audiences, replacing their emotional resonance instead with a “critical attention”, a state mingled with shock and confusion.1 Logical structure of plays breaks down in order to explore human irrationality; historically speaking, the concept of social and technological determinism is greatly undermined in the West during the great conflicts of the 20th century: there was no longer one valid set of social values, nor was the certainty of progress persuasive any more.2

Theatre of the Absurd also rejects the Naturalist tradition. Instead of depicting everything as it appears and hiding meanings in fine lines, plays in the Theatre of the Absurd express in explicit manners raw human emotions.3 Esslin suggests that many of these plays are examples of “pure theatre”, where naturalistic and structural integrity can easily be discarded, as they are not necessary for eliciting intense emotional responses from the audiences.4 The setting for Waiting for Godot contains little to no visual stimuli: the only props required by script are a stone and a tree. The minimalist staging, combined with a lack of temporal and spatial cues of the surroundings, suggest that this play is by no means any particular event that has happened in recorded history, but an occurrence that is existential and universal by nature.5 The audiences are forced to suspend disbelief. For instance, they have to understand that the atypical absence of one of the core characters of the play, Godot, in fact serves a narrative purpose.6

Waiting for Godot is often explained in the context of the absurd. The toiling of Vladimir and Estragon’s dialogue is similar to Albert Camus’s depiction of the punishment of Sisyphus, one endlessly waiting for Godot while the other having to roll up a boulder only to see it rolling back down again. If the play is to be interpreted in Kierkegaardian existentialist terms, Godot appears to be a God-like figure. The audiences, along with Vladimir and Estragon, have never seen Godot. The Godot in the play is only created by Didi and Gogo’s reflection on him. Kierkegaardian theology regards subjectivity as the way to approach truth, and because Didi and Gogo failed to approach Godot objectively, they must do so subjectively. Their raison d’être then, involves this becoming that, through leap of faith, is forever anticipating the arrival of the Savior.7

Language in Waiting for Godot is something that fails. Instead of utilizing any traditional dialogue, Vladimir and Estragon rely on language games and slapstick humor while waiting for Godot. They engage in absurd yet pre-scripted actions to construct external reality and to avoid reflecting on their interiority. Utterances become a replacement for thinking for Gogo and Didi, a fruitless method for them to escape from the ambiguities they are confronting in the play: would Godot ever show up, why are they waiting for him, and when would they die? Instead, whenever either Vladimir and Godot approach ever so close in their utterances in approaching any ideas, the other abruptly distracts both the other and the audiences by falling back to meaningless dialogue and slapstick humor. Even when Didi and Gogo argue and they threaten to leave each other, signifying a return to interiority, they reunite because they realize that they both need each other to resort back to language games.8 When Lucky goes on his only monologue in the play, his seemingly nonsensical language hides too many reflections to the dreadful state of existence that Gogo and Didi, along with Pozzo, can do nothing except from violently shutting him down; he is a player who transgressed the rules of Vladimir and Estragon’s language games, he actually said something.9

The analysis of the language games reveal a pursuit of Vladimir and Estragon to be, interestingly, “anti-Existential”.10 By subjecting themselves to the need for waiting, they abide decision and responsibility. “Nothing to be done” is the phrase uttered the most throughout the play. Their helplessness is a way for them to feel secure while facing their own existential questioning, deferring making decisions in order to present themselves as innocent: it’s not one’s fault if there is nothing to be done! This same kind of concession of authenticity for security can be found in the relationship between Pozzo and Lucky. Pozzo follows time to a morbid degree so he could have control over time and thus cannot do more to prevent his loss of time: nothing to be done.11 For Lucky, although one can say his suffering is not of his own invention, Pozzo’s explanation for why Lucky does not put down his bags, “Certainly he has [the right to]. It follows that he doesn’t want to,” and his narration of what Lucky used to be reveals the fact that Lucky, perhaps, has chosen a similar strategy.

What reunites an existentialist reading and an analysis of the language games, the two coming from relatively different intellectual backgrounds separating Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, is a postmodernist criticism of the nature of Logos in the 20th century, particularly among French philosophers, where Beckett mostly lived. 

Linguistics, in its 20th century infancy, was mostly analyzed with logical positivism. Confident analytical philosophers set sail to the mission of solving all of humanity’s linguistic problems so as to approach an absolute reality, since, for much of Western history, Logos is equivalent to Cosmos: to say is to express what is present, what is absent cannot be said.12 As the century progressed, thinkers such as Saussure and Derrida, the former commenting on the nature of relativity in the signified’s acquisition of meaning while the latter applying Deconstruction to break down logocentrism. In a similar fashion Beckett’s uses repetition ad nauseam to undermine language as a definite concept.13

Language is no longer seen as a system that can represent anything real, language is ultimately cyclical and self-referential, unveiling language only creates more layers of language itself. This comes to Beckett’s rejection of Naturalism, because the premise of Naturalism is to assume that language and human perception can reasonably arrive at any exterior truth.14 In Waiting for Godot, when Gogo and Didi say, they merely say; when Gogo and Didi see, they merely see. Even saying and seeing are often unreliable because of their degrading physical abilities.

Both the existentialist and linguistic reading approaches Godot as a failure of dialectics. Beckett intentionally preserves the distance between faithful existence/linguistic play with authentic/noumenal meaning because the struggle to close the dialectic is what creates the tension and ultimately the commentary Waiting for Godot is trying to offer.15 Both faith and empiricism fails to reach any point of convergence, and instead fumbles into a “timeless circularity”.16 Pozzo and Lucky’s relationship also resonates with the Lord-Bondsman dialectic, but instead of coming to any conclusion as Hegel predicted, Pozzo becomes blinded while Lucky becomes mute. Same for Vladimir and Estragon’s roles, they interchange dialogues and repeat each other, their participation in language games and their decision to exit are all ultimately cyclical. Nor are their languages even consistent with their actions; the play ends with both Gogo and Didi proclaiming “Lets go!” while staying thoroughly still. In this manner the unsuccessful dialectic happens between the characters, between words and action, Logos and Cosmos, and as Esslin mentioned, between the play and the audience, who are “put into suspense” for the meaning behind the play. Waiting for Godot, thus, is a play that explores futility to an extreme, when everything happened and nothing happened, where death becomes even trivial talk. Didi and Gogo, two fictional characters in an irregular temporal state and in a space that never was, manage to continue their dialogue even after their curtain comes down. The audiences too, are waiting for a conclusion that never comes.

  1. Esslin, 5-6 ↩︎
  2. Esslin, 6 ↩︎
  3. Esslin, 7 ↩︎
  4. Esslin, 4 ↩︎
  5. Josbin and Cunneen, 207 ↩︎
  6. Anurag, 275 ↩︎
  7. Anurag, 276-277 ↩︎
  8. Bohman-Kalaja, 465-478
    ↩︎
  9. Bohman-Kalaja, 485 ↩︎
  10. Levy, 21 ↩︎
  11. Levy, 27-28 ↩︎
  12. Velissariou, 49 ↩︎
  13. Velissariou, 52 ↩︎
  14. Velissariou, 48 ↩︎
  15. Velissariou, 46 ↩︎
  16. Bohman-Kalaja, 481 ↩︎

Works Cited

Esslin, Martin. “The Theatre of the Absurd.” The Tulane Drama Review 4, no. 4 (1960): 3–15. https://doi.org/10.2307/1124873. 
Josbin, Raoul, and Joseph E. Cunneen. “‘WAITING FOR GODOT.’” CrossCurrents 6, no. 3 (1956): 204–7. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24456672. 
Kimberly Bohman-Kalaja. “Playing the Spectator While Waiting for Godot.” The Princeton University Library Chronicle 68, no. 1–2 (2007): 465–87. https://doi.org/10.25290/prinunivlibrchro.68.1-2.0465. 
Levy, Eric P. “False Innocence in Waiting for Godot.” Journal of Beckett Studies 3, no. 2 (1994): 19–36. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26468121. 
Sharma, Anurag. “‘WAITING FOR GODOT:’ A Beckettian Counterfoil to Kierkegaardian Existentialism.” Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 2 (1993): 275–80. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25781175. 
Velissariou, Aspasia. “Language in ‘Waiting for Godot.’” Journal of Beckett Studies, no. 8 (1982): 45–57. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44782289.
Heperus