Samuel Beckett 's Waiting For Godot, Endgame, And Not I

When looking at Hamlet, one could say that William Shakespeare put the play together as a very cathartic tragedy. The emotional result of dealing with so many deaths brings on a plethora of emotions which are not usually felt in a typical play. Hamlet begins not with the normal prosperity and good fortune as do most tragedies, but with a more stifling and depressing sort of mood (Tekany 115). However, something else could be said about this play as well. The play centers on Hamlet and his existential characteristics, such as angst, isolation and his confrontations with nothingness. The exhibition of these characteristics proves Hamlet to be an existential character.

While Beckett’s works are often defined by their existentialist themes, Endgame seems to offer no solution to the despair and melancholia of Hamm, Clov, Nagg, and Nell. The work is replete with overdetermination that confounds the efforts of critics and philosophers to construct a single, unified theme for the play. Beckett resisted any effort to reconcile the problems of his world, offer solutions, or quench any fears overtly. However, this surface level of understanding that aligns Beckett with the pessimism of the Modernist movement is ironically different from the symbolic understanding that Beckett promotes through his characters and the scene. Beckett’s work does not suggest total hopelessness,

Although there are situational and developmental variables at stake, ultimately, Beckett is dealing with an existential crisis. He is coming face to face with his own mortality, and in so doing, confronts moral and ethical issues related to his relationship with his law firm and colleagues.

Theatre is a complex art that attempts to weave stories of varying degrees of intricacies with the hope that feelings will be elicited from the audience. Samuel Beckett’s most famous work in the theatre world, however, is Waiting for Godot, the play in which, according to well-known Irish critic Vivian Mercier, “nothing happens, twice.” Beckett pioneered many different levels of groundbreaking and avant-garde theatre and had a large influence on the section of the modern idea of presentational theatre as opposed to the representational. His career seemingly marks the end of modernism in theatre and the creation of what is known as the “Theatre of the Absurd.”

William Shakespeare 's Hamlet portrays as multitude of ideas, meanings and interpretations. In this essay, I will focus on analyzing Hamlet through the post-modern existential lens of nihilism. Nihilism has five main types; political, moral, epistemological, cosmic, and existential. Throughout the course of the play, Hamlet shows many characteristics that showcase these principles , such as apathy and despair. Hamlet is a nihilist character because through his actions of mania and despair he shows that life is overall meaningless. He also has a lack of respect for authority and a rejection of moral principles.

The buggers from Orson Scott Cards Enders game and subsequent novels, at first appear to be bug eyed monsters, a science fiction cliché. However as the story develops it becomes apparent that the buggers are much more than just a cliché, they develop as a sentient species, they undergo a transformation from varelse, “the true alien” (speaker 34) into raman “the stranger that we recognise as human but of another species”. (34) As this transformation occurs Ender learns a great deal from the buggers, in this manner card illustrates that there is much one can learn from the transformation of varelse to raman.

Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett's existential masterpiece, for some odd reason has captured the minds of millions of readers, artists, and critics worldwide, joining them all in an attempt to interpret the play. Beckett has told them not to read anything into his work, yet he does not stop them. Perhaps he recognizes the human quality of bringing personal experiences and such to the piece of art, and interpreting it through such colored lenses. Hundreds of theories are expounded, all of them right and none of them wrong. A play is only what you bring to it, in a subconscious connection between you and the playwright.

Modernist fiction is incredibly dense and abstract. Writers from the twentieth century also seem to carry with them the weight of the world, and thus their fiction has been filled with realistic misery and pain. Still, these writers often add to this element with existentialist thematic structures, which construct a very unique and experimental viewpoint on a modern existence. This is what is occurring in both Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot as well as Albert Camus' The Stranger. The two a very different in format, yet both play upon the modernist idea of abandonment by God and the idea that there is an underlying sense of nothingness that guides modern life. Each focuses on the notion of free will and how it determines our lives in a world devoid of God. Together, these great works of contemporary fiction are a telling testament to the changing nature of sentiments regarding both religion and the meaning of life in a tumultuous twentieth century paradigm.

The word ‘tragedy’ is a common in the modern world, and it is often associated with a “sad or unhappy ending”. Accordingly, every time there is misfortune in a work, it is classified as a ‘tragedy’. Arthur Miller offers the observation that a tragedy is something that is more than just sad. Miller argues that tragedy is not a ‘pessimistic’ view on an event, but it allows for “the reinforcement of the onlookers brightest opinions of the human animal”. Since humans are not in control of his/her own fate, unfortunate things are bound to happen. However, the human spirit that is able to withstand catastrophe allows for hope. In the play Hamlet, Shakespeare presents his tragic hero, Hamlet, as a noble figure who is to be admired because he

Who is Godot and what does he represent? These are two of the questions that Samuel Beckett allows both his characters and the audience to ponder. Many experiences in this stage production expand and narrow how these questions are viewed. The process of waiting reassures the characters in Beckett's play that they do indeed exist. One of the roles that Beckett has assigned to Godot is to be a savior of sorts. Godot helps to give the two tramps in Waiting for Godot a sense of purpose. Godot is an omnipresent character that helps to give meaning and function to the lives of two homeless men.

William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is one of the world’s most renowned plays, one which has stood the test of time over the course of 400 years, finding relevance even today. A complex and sophisticated work, Hamlet is a masterful weaving of the myriad of components that make up the human experience; it delicately touches upon such topics as death, romance, vengeance, and mania, among several others. Being so intricate and involuted, Hamlet has been interpreted in countless fashions since its conception, with each reader construing it through their own subjectivity. Some of the most popular and accredited methods of analyzing the work are the Traditional Revenge Tragedy, Existentialist, Psychoanalytic, Romantic, and Act of Mourning approaches.

The periods of silence in Waiting for Godot are moments in which the characters realize where there is no certainty, there can be no definite meanings and words are just futile nonsense. No matter how much they use language, how long they talk to each other or what they talk about, silence will eventually fall on them like a haunting cloud, reminding them that they are no more than two tramps who are waiting for someone to redeem them.

Suffering is a staple to the human condition. It can light the fire beneath and push progress, or it can lead to wallowing and a sense of helplessness. Often, helplessness leads to despair, which leads to more suffering, beginning an endless cycle of distress and anguish. Once stuck in this cycle, personal suffering begins to affect all aspects of one’s life, especially the environment around them. This feeling moves across genres and literary eras, giving a sense of human connection across generations. In Robert Browning’s Caliban Upon Setebos, Caliban is stuck in the world of an uncaring god. With an inability to please him, Caliban is helpless in his plight. Similarly, Hamm, from Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, is stuck in a cycle of

1. How does the relationship between Vladimir and Estragon compare with the relationship between Pozzo and Lucky? What is the effect created by the contrast between these two pairs of characters? Is it significant that the characters appear in pairs, rather than alone?

In Waiting for Godot, Beckett often focused on the idea of "the suffering of being." Most of the play deals with the fact that Estragon and Vladimir are waiting for something to relieve them from their boredom. Godot can be understood as one of the many things in life that people wait for. Waiting for Godot is part of the ‘Theater of the Absurd’. This implies that it is meant to be irrational and meaningless. Absurd theater does not have the concepts of drama, chronological plot, logical language, themes, and recognizable settings. There is also a split between the intellect and the body within the work. Vladimir represents the intellect and Estragon the body, both cannot exist without the other.