Waiting for Godot: One day at a time
…The following is an excerpt from my essay “Life is absurd, futile, and inevitably ends, just like this essay” detailing the existentialist ideals in major absurdist works…
Waiting for Godot opens with Estragon and Vladimir, Gogo and Didi respectively, meeting again in the middle of the stage. The stage is set with a tree, a country road, and a low ditch. Gogo and Didi are good friends waiting for a decision from Godot in order to leave where they are. Throughout the play, the main players meet Pozzo, a man of power within his own reason, Lucky, a man under the power of Pozzo, and a boy, the messenger of Godot. The two-act tragicomedy utilizes these characters to objectify free will and the concept of hope that occurs because of this existentialist conviction.
Towards the beginning of the first act, Didi attempts to quote “Hope deferred maketh the something sick…” (Beckett). The correct quote is from Proverbs 13:12, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life” (Proverbs 13.12). It is interesting how Didi never finished the entire line, the first half of the scripture can reference Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential belief of existential dread. Jean-Paul believes the dread, or “sick heart”, derives from the ability to hope, that is, the human need to believe something good will come at the end of the road to make everything that has happened along the path worth the journey. The Oxford bible differs from Sartre with the inclusion of the second half of the passage: The Judeo-Christian religion believes that the almighty being above them will provide answers through scripture or prayer, and through this life will be fulfilled. Sartre and Beckett believe hope is a manifestation of the inability to make your own free will decisions, and instead a person will use another person/deity to relieve their feeling of existential dread. Estragon and Vladimir do not receive this validation and are left waiting for an answer from Godot.
The manifestation of free will occurs in three ways in Waiting for Godot. Beginning with the extremes, Pozzo represents self with too much free will. In essence, this is a man who has obtained the will of others to further the freedom of his own. This is apparent in his sudden appearance onstage, being pulled by Lucky and wielding a whip in his hands. Throughout both passages in the plays where he is prevalent, Pozzo is controlling or attempting to control another man’s will. A very specific and early on occurrence is the chicken bone debacle, where Pozzo throws his chicken bones away and when asked by Didi if the scraps were available, he set off to demean Vladimir in order to place himself at a higher pedestal than the other three characters onstage (Beckett). Even when blinded, Pozzo still finds a way to order Estragon around the stage in an ungracious manner. If a religious allegory were to be made in this clearly existential paper, Pozzo could represent a false idol.
The second manifestation occurs in the extremes of human free will with Lucky. Lucky is a character who begins and ends as a human cab horse[1] to Pozzo. Since Pozzo was the extreme of too much free will, it is safe to assume Lucky is the manifestation of little to no free will. Essentially, Lucky is a whipping boy, unable to speak unless given permission by his master to do so. Only with his hat is lucky able to achieve free will and a stream of conscious spews forth from his mouth, making him almost impossible to stop and settle down[2] (Beckett). Later in the production, Lucky has an opportunity to leave without his tormentor in act two, but he was incapacitated by his lack of will.
In the third manifestation, Estragon and Vladimir both represent a human with the ability to make their own free will choices. When left to their own devices the two of them, instead of making choices, decide it is better to wait for a choice from a being they deem above them. This is still a choice after all, but it is a choice that seems to diminish their free will. It can be said that Didi and Gogo live in existential dread, refusing to move from their solitary spot while waiting for Godot’s messenger. Absurdism uses cyclical plots and repetition, this section of dialogue occurs numerous times:
ESTRAGON: Let’s go.
VLADIMIR: We can’t.
ESTRAGON: Why not?
VLADIMIR: We’re waiting for Godot. (Beckett)
Estragon is always making the willful decision to leave their length of road, whereas Vladimir is always the one to remind him of their current task. Beckett never explains if these two men received instruction from Godot or his messenger to wait there, or if they heard in their travels of a person with the answer to their question. It can be stated, because of the numerous religious allegories in the work, that Didi and Gogo did not speak to Godot before the play began, rather the two have heard about an omnipotence named Godot who could give their lives a meaning. The cyclical nature and refusal to leave without answers would be Beckett’s allegory for society that cannot comprehend the notion of free will, believing destiny and fate has decided their answers, and use other concepts [religious idols, parental units, etc.] to define life and its meaning. Waiting for Godot is an existentialist piece condemning those with dread of the afterlife and the inability to think for themselves.
[1] Cab horse- a horse meant to draw carriage or store items in travel
[2] In another time and place, I could write four pages on hat symbolism. Today is not that day.
Works Cited
Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. 1953.
Crowell, Steven. “Existentialism.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Spring 2015. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. 2015. Encyclopedia entry. <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/existentialism/>.
Oxford. The English Standard Version Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments. Oxford UP, 2009. Print.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Washington Square Press, 1943. Book.
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