Waiting for Godot is Beckett's translation of his own original French-language play, En attendant Godot, and is subtitled (in English only) 'a tragicomedy in two acts'. Waiting for Godot is a play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), wait for the arrival of someone named Godot, who never arrives, and while waiting they engage in a variety of discussions and encounter three other characters. please stop kicking me! I don't know! I don't know!Įn Attendant Godot = Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett shifting relationship between the signifier and the signified.

LUCKY: Man's search for himself in an inhospitable cosmos. POZZO: My sight has been miraculously restored. Maybe you can explain the meaning of this play? VLADIMIR: Idiot! This isn't about your boots. Still, we can try.ĮSTRAGON: My boots don't fit. VLADIMIR: This play! We have to explain it. VLADIMIR: No, we're supposed to say what it means. The best review of the play is the one that is not written. I think it's impossible to review Waiting for Godot adequately, not even after a long and thorough analysis, because in that case one would be seeking directions where none exist.

By the end the reader becomes one with the characters, waiting for things to happen, for something to happen, but nothing ever happens. The act of wait, which is an act of life, is given a comic dimension in the play. You may hypothesize at will and the text will lend you a hand to prove it.īeckett in his frugal minimalist brilliance paints a powerful imagery of an agitated self, a helpless being, a lonely traveller, in eternal yet meaningless wait, which life ultimately is, till we take the final leap into oblivion. You can attach any meaning to the memorable symbolism and it helps you comprehend that meaning.

Or perhaps everything happens? You can look at from any number of angles and it adapts itself to your point of view. Suffice it to say that the sheer speed of the bare dialogue makes you want to slow down and look for something queer happening between the lines, but nothing happens. Or like a blurb-writer I could summarise the four-and-a-half characters, the austere landscape, the leafless tree, the role of the taut rope and jangling bucket, and the heap of nonsense, but what would that achieve? I could draw upon the elusive symbolism of the text in the manner of a perspicacious hermeneut whose convoluted exegesis would only serve to frustrate him even more. Waiting and nothing – I could take these two words and use them in as many combinations as the rules of probability allow to create a ‘review’ that would be as much meaningful as it would be meaningless.

Waiting for godot book