Chasing Coffee

Waiting for Godot

I read Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett.

Off the top of my head, it seems like in the first act all of the characters are trapped and unable to move onward. Estragon and Vladimir are unable to move on from their location because they are waiting for something that never comes. Lucky is paralyzed by the cruelty of his master weighed against the hope of approval. Pozzo draws his identity from his possessions and despite claims that he wishes to divest himself of Lucky his view of Lucky as possession causes him to be unable to throw Lucky away as throwing away a possession would be throwing part of himself away. Even the boy at the end is trapped, his subservient state causing him to move into fear due to the will of others.

It reminds me of how I felt during significant portions of my marriage.

The second act begins with a recursive song, foreshadowing how the act shows the characters trapped into repeating the same day over and over again. I suppose that parts of the dialog between Vladimir and Estragon could be taken as an attack on philosophy, pointing out how debate for the sake of debate is pointless and only serves to kill time and bring us closer to death.

In particular, Estragon who knows and remembers nothing, could be taken as a cruel caricature of Socrates. His state of truly knowing nothing causing only confusion instead of enlightenment.

Having Pozzo and Lucky return aged and decrepit could be taken to show the fundamentally flawed pursuit of material gain over all else, both as manager (who has gone blind, unable to see the things which once motivated him) or as worker (who has spent so long under dehumanizing conditions that he has in fact lost/forgotten the ability to speak when he needs it and has become not human).

The play is open to a wide variety of interpretations, perhaps it is most significant in that within the broken logic of the dialog we can see something of ourselves that we may not have wanted to see.

Posted by matt at August 18, 2003 10:22 PM