Beckett’s search for identity and meaning – PhD lecturer Andreia Suciu

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot- The search for identity and meaning
– lecture notes –

PhD lecturer Andreia Suciu

“Vasile Alecsandri” University of Bacău,
Romania
1. Introduction
 The play was first published in French (En attendant Godot) in 1952.
 It was staged in English (bearing also the subtitle A Tragicomedy in Two Acts) in 1955 at the Arts
Theatre in London, after having been translated by the author himself.
 Some of the innovations included the handling of form and subject matter, the exploitation of space
and characters’ movement.
 One important idea is that of circularity and similarity, creating the impression of almost perfectly
repetitious structures. The acts happen in the same place, at the same time in consecutive days,
thrusting the characters in the mechanisms of a very exact machine that never fails to repeat a cycle
(of their existence)
 The beauty of the play consists in the variety of interpretations (or rather speculations) that have been
offered, in an almost inexhaustible undertaking - Samuel Beckett himself said that “The key word in
my plays is ‘perhaps’”.

2. Subject matter
 The generally accepted idea is that it presents the monotony and meaningless of life and the way in
which people are, more or less consciously, caught within this trap.
 The human condition is pictured as one of:
- ignorance (of their own position and role);
- delusion (their fixed false belief into the coming of Godot) ;
- self-delusion (the disguising of their purposelessness in life behind the illusion of having a goal);
- paralysis (their inability to come out of their monotonous existence despite repeated attempts and
mutual urgings);
- wit (see the surprising aphoristic observations of one or other of the characters in the very middle of
incoherent flow of line and speech);
- traces of human sympathy .
Interpretations:
 a wide gamut of religious issues being debated in the play:
- sin – the sin of having been born from which they can never expiate;
- repentance;
- salvation and damnation;
- Hell;
- bearing one’s cross;
- reading the Bible as literature not as dogma;
- the use of the symbol of the tree reminding of the Tree of Knowledge;
- the relationship between characters resemblant to that of Cain and Abel who are even mentioned in
the play.
The waiting for Godot was associated with the waiting of God as a presence to fill our souls or our empty lives
 political issues – the context brought in front of the audience is that of the post-war political state
whose actors in various circles have been stripped of their identities;
 other issues: suicide, questioning ontological/ religious/ philosophical issues in life, death vs. living
(living a dead life), complementary living, coping with an ageless age in a meaningless existence, the
practicality of life vs. the dream
 Beckett’s search for identity and meaning – PhD lecturer Andreia Suciu

3. Characters in search of … (a) Godot

 They are most of the time presented in couples or pairs, a device whose main function is that of
presenting at work the principles of
- power;
- domination and
- exploitation and only too rarely
- friendship and
- mutual help or compelementarity
the last three emerging especially out of the need for integration or the need for protection.
They (re)present different aspects of the psyche or drives of the id in relationships of the sort:
 the practical (Vladimir) and the dreamer (Estragon,);
 the persistent and the volatile;
 the servant and the master (Lucky and Pozzo);
 reminder of the past and a denier of the past or of the utility of remembering;
 the physical and the mental;
 the pragmatic and the spiritual,
 Godot was interpreted as:
- God (English meaning);
- “godillot” means “boot” in French slang transmits probably the message that the characters are
waiting for the right pair of boots to take them far away;
- death (the German word “tod” means “death”);
- “go deo” in Irish means “eternity” – alluding to the (pseudo)eternity the characters are caught in;
- other translations of the same Irish syntagm as “for ever”, “indefinitely” stress the characters’ act of
waiting as the only meaningful act in their lives or so as to show their entrapment in a dimension of
time which is not measured anymore by the clock, but by their endurance;
- a benefactor;
 Ultimately he is a waited-for presence (of an event, a thing, a person or death itself) that keeps the
characters chained in and to existence, he is hope, achievement, eternity, he is whatever makes us see
the life-as-waiting meaning of our existence.

4. Idiosyncratic time and space

TIME
 The characters feel a very wide gap between the present moment and the past – signalling at the fact
that their existence seems to have been lived up to a present moment at which it stopped into an ever
repetitious spiral which does not give them the possibility to distinguish differences anymore.
 They either feel regret for what was once or they cannot remember.
 The stretching of time into a “permanent” present, into a series of nows is meant to give the
characters the illusion of an active waiting, the impression that they surpass passivity and move
towards a some kind of activity which creates for them the false impression of mastering reality
SPACE
 Beckett felt the need to create a narrower space in which he could control better both the location
and movement of the characters as well as other devices which contribute to the building of the
space:
- light;
- the possibility to foreground a character and background another;
- exploiting low or up positions, etc.
 Beckett’s search for identity and meaning – PhD lecturer Andreia Suciu

 However, it is not the narrowness of the space in the play that creates the feeling of oppression upon
the characters for it is an open space – it is their inability to move beyond the imaginary limits of such
a space that leads to their helplessness.

5. Motifs
The tree - this motif seems to be in the end paradoxically devoid of any meaning since various interpretations
annul one another. Some of these interpretations:
 a means of measuring time optimistically;
 knowledge as a revival of the archetypal tree from the Garden of Eden which would only mean the
bringing of mortality;
 a gallows-tree (perfect for hanging);
 paradoxical mutual exclusive symbol for both change and stability;
 the Cross ;
 a false hiding place (contributing to the characters’ self-delusion of finding a solution to escape their
plight);
 the name of a yoga balancing exercise;
 a symbol of sorrow.

The rope
 a means of controlling and subduing humans (in the relationship between Pozzo and Lucky);
 the tying of the characters to a spatial dimension or to a temporal axis (or better said to temporal dot
on the time axis) suggesting the idea of entrapment;
 the tying of the characters to an idea so as to give them the illusion that they have a purpose, that
they have stability;
 death.

6. Experimenting with language

Niklaus Gessner identified ten different modes of disintegration of language:
 misunderstandings;
 double-meaning answers;
 monologues as an indication of the inability to communicate;
 clichés;
 repetitions of synonyms;
 inability to find the right words;
 chaotic nonsense;
 telegraphic style of shouted commands;
 the loss of grammatical structure and the use of elliptical structures
 the dropping of marks of punctuation.
Gessner, Niklaus, The Inadequacy of Language, apud Martin Esslin, 1977, op.cit., p. 86.

6.1. Silence – a new type of language

 Michael Worton makes a classification of different types of silence and pauses and the functions that
they have.
 silences of inadequacies (characters cannot find their words);
 silences of repression (characters are verbally benumbed by the attitude of their interlocutor or by the
incapacity of breaking a social taboo);
 silences of anticipation (characters await the response of the other);
 Beckett’s search for identity and meaning – PhD lecturer Andreia Suciu

 silences in which the reader/ spectator can intervene creatively and speculate upon meanings and
continuations.
All these lead to a fragmentation of the text into speeches and episodes that eschew to present a central,
dominant idea.

6.2. Naming – characters through linguistic labelling

The names of the four characters have been interpreted as representatives of the great four powers of the
world in the immediate context following World War II:
- Vladimir (a Slavic name, probably Russian);
- Estragon (with French origins);
- Pozzo (bearing an Italian musicality);
- Lucky (a typical English name)
seem to render the absurd relationships in which these four great nations were engaged at the times the play
was written.
 Estragon’s and Vladimir names have been interpreted as marking even better the complementarity
between them:
- Estragon may be a perversion of the term “estrogen” (the feminine);
- Vladimir means etymologically “to rule over, to be strong” (the masculine).
Their nicknames – Gogo and Didi – could be a reference to:
- their childishness;
- two clown-like names and characters all together.
Clown-like appearances seem to be from a certain perspective even Lucky and Pozzo (especially the musicality
of their names would lead to such an interpretation).
 According to Bernard Dukore in Didi, Gogo and the Absent Godot, another interpretation for their
names is that:
- Gogo stands for the incomplete ego (*e+go*e+go), the "missing pleasure principle“;
- while Didi (id id) is the instinctual and irrational part or the subversion of the rational principle.
Godot would have in this interpretation the role of the superego.
 “Fartov” and “Belcher” in Lucky's monologue – names which add more evidently to the parody that
the playwright builds against very pretentious, exaggerated scholars and their manner of speaking in
academic speeches;
 “Steinweg” and “Peterman” (German “stein”=stone; Greek “peter”=stone) are other characters
appearing in Lucky’s monologue showing the dryness of speech (“dry stone/ stone dry”) and its
impossibility of producing meaning anymore;
 “Testew” (“testes”), “Cunard” (“cunt”), Possy” (“pussy”), Feckham” (“fuck him”) driving us towards the
condemning of the overwhelming instinctuality of the individual.

Conclusions
 Incomprehensible or subtle meaningful;
 humorous or ironic;
 lethargic or inciting
Samuel Beckett’s plays have brought a new trend in the world of drama which may even have laid the
foundations of postmodern fragmented type of writing.

Bibliography
 Esslin, Martin (1977): The Theatre of the Absurd, revised and enlarged edition, Penguin Books.
 Graver, Lawrence (1989/ 2004): Samuel Beckett: ‘Waiting for Godot’, Cambridge University Press.
 Pilling, John (ed.) (1994): The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, Cambridge University Press.
 Wandor, Michelene (2001): Post-War British Drama: Looking Back in Gender, Routledge.