Samuel Beckett 's Waiting For Godot

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.”

An average person spends about 9% of his or her life in school. That’s roughly 14,000 hours in school from the time you enter kindergarten, until the time you graduate high school. Growing up we almost always swear that going to school is the worst possible thing our parents could ever make us do. We thought of it as a punishment rather than a privilege. I had these same emotions majority of my school career, until I met the one teacher who made me excited to come to school every day.

Education and school. Some of you are now grimacing at the prospect of being trapped inside a classroom. Others are now thinking what I wouldn’t do to be able to go back and start all over again. Now don’t worry, I’m not going to convince you that you should love school. My job isn’t to change your perspective on school like a politician would do.

Students are usually forced to go to school every day, otherwise there are consequences. I was one of those students until I found things worth going for. Learning things that I like makes me eager to pursue knowledge. This is the discourse community I am a part of, and it took me seven years to figure this out.

There might be a time where people ask you, “why are you in college” or “why to decide to go to college.” People might reply by saying that they want a degree, that they want a higher paying job, or they need that for a future career that they are pursuing. Those responses are the most typical reason of why people go to college. Sure you can say that having a degree means that a person can get a better job with better pay rather than working in the manual labor fields with minimum pay. A college degree is the fundamental stepping stone to the future, it lays the foundation of where to start. College is everything to me; I’m in college so I’m able to unlock more potential in myself, to be able to make my mother proud with everything that she has done and hopefully becoming the first.

Time after time you hear about going to college; whether at work, family, friends, and even when you are in high school you might have been repeatedly told of how it can benefit you in the long run in regards to your future. They say a good education can take you far in life. Students in high school may still question the importance of a college education. In the world of today people find themselves asking, “Why is it important to go to college?” An important aspect of succeeding in today’s world is getting a better education, and it’s much more than just a degree - in college you also learn how to better prepare for assignments, perhaps one of the most important things you can get out of attending

     Samuel Beckett was forty-two years old and living in post-war Paris when he wrote Waiting for Godot as an exercise to help rid himself of the writer's block which was hindering his work in fiction. Once he started, he became increasingly absorbed in the play, and scribbled it almost without hesitation into a soft-cover notebook in a creative burst that lasted from October 9, 1948, until he completed the typed manuscript on January 29, 1949. After some revision, he offered the script to several producers, but it was refused. Although Beckett himself gave up hope with the script, his wife was more persistent, and, acting as his agent, she continued to approach

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.

Schools form the fundamental pillars in a person’s life right from the childhood to the age when he hits adolescence. These fundamental pillars such as self-discipline, moral values, awareness about a society and how to give and take respect to develop social and personal relationships in life, are just some of the various principles that are taught in school. These are the reasons why I think people decide to go to school and develop themselves.

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.

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.

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?

Waiting for Godot is the most influential work of the XX century. Although Samuel Beckett, its author, did not want it to be interpreted, readers started to interpret it and nowadays the interpretations are endless. In this brief essay I focus my attention on two topics: the role of stage directions in the play and in some aspects of the characterization of the few people that intervene in it.

The play Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett is famous for its cyclic storyline and non-existing plot. In the lines, Beckett incorporates themes of existentialism and the loss of hope. Throughout the two acts of the play, the main protagonists, Vladimir and Estragon, spend their days waiting aimlessly for a mysterious figure named Godot. While central in the play, Godot never makes an appearance in any act, and merely exists as a name. While Pozzo and Lucky, two other characters make their appearance in each act of the play, the boy is perhaps the most mysterious and intriguing. The boy, whom appears towards the end of each act, exemplifies the never-ending cycle of the search for hope that remains unfulfilled through the use of symbolism,

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.