write the essay of waiting for godot as absurd play

A Summary and Analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Waiting for Godot is one of the most important plays of the twentieth century. But analysing its significance is not easy, because Beckett’s play represents a major departure from many conventions and audience expectations regarding the theatre.

Beginning life as a French play which Beckett wrote in the late 1940s, Waiting for Godot premiered in London in 1955, initially to negative reviews, although the support of the influential theatre critic Kenneth Tynan soon transformed its fortunes.

Curiously, one of Beckett’s motives for writing the play was financial need: he was in need of money and so made the decision to turn from novel-writing to writing for the stage. Indeed, Beckett considered Waiting for Godot a ‘bad play’, but posterity has begged to differ, and it is now viewed as perhaps the greatest English-language play of the entire twentieth century.

Before we offer an analysis of the play’s meaning and structure, here’s a quick summary of its plot.

Waiting for Godot : summary

The ‘plot’ of Waiting for Godot is easy enough to summarise. The setting is a country road, near a leafless tree, where two men, Vladimir and Estragon, are waiting for the arrival of a man named Godot.

In order to pass the time while they wait for Godot to arrive, the two men talk about a variety of subjects, including how they spent the previous night (Vladimir passed his night in a ditch being beaten up by a variety of people), how the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ is described in the different Gospels, and even whether they should hang themselves from the nearby tree.

A man named Pozzo turns up, leading Lucky, his servant, with a rope around his neck like an animal. Pozzo tells them that he is on his way to the market, where he intends to sell Lucky. He eats a picnic, and Vladimir requests that Lucky entertain them while they wait for Godot to arrive.

After Lucky has performed a dance for them, he is ordered to think: an instruction which leads him to give a long speech which only ends when he is wrestled to the ground.

Lucky and Pozzo leave, and a Boy arrives with a message announcing that Godot will not be coming today after all, but will come tomorrow. Vladimir and Estragon decide to leave, but then promptly remain exactly where they are.

The second act of the play opens the next day – although, oddly, the tree has grown a number of leaves overnight, suggesting that more time than this has passed. Vladimir and Estragon discover Lucky’s hat which he had left behind, and the two men role-play at pretending to be Lucky and Pozzo.

They then throw insults at each other to pass the time. Lucky and Pozzo return, but they have changed overnight: Lucky can no longer speak, and Pozzo is blind.

When Lucky and Pozzo fall to the ground, Vladimir and Estragon try to help them up, but end up falling down too. Pozzo has no memory of meeting the two men the day before. He and Lucky leave again, with Vladimir and Estragon left to wait for Godot.

The Boy returns, but he denies being the same one that came to them yesterday. Once again, Godot will not be turning up today, but will come tomorrow, he tells them. The two men decide to hang themselves in their desperation, using Estragon’s belt, but all that happens is his trousers fall down.

They decide to leave, but stay exactly where they are – presumably determined to stay another day and continue ‘waiting for Godot’.

Waiting for Godot : analysis

Waiting for Godot is often described as a play in which nothing happens, twice. The ‘action’ of the second act mirrors and reprises what happens in the first: Vladimir and Estragon passing the time waiting for the elusive Godot, Lucky and Pozzo turning up and then leaving, and the Boy arriving with his message that Godot will not be coming that day.

With this structure in mind, it is hardly surprising that the play is often interpreted as a depiction of the pointless, uneventful, and repetitive nature of modern life, which is often lived in anticipation of something which never materialises. It is always just beyond the horizon, in the future, arriving ‘tomorrow’.

However, contrary to popular belief, this is not what made Waiting for Godot such a revolutionary piece of theatre. As Michael Patterson observes in The Oxford Guide to Plays (Oxford Quick Reference) , the theme of promised salvation which never arrives had already been explored by a number of major twentieth-century playwrights, including Eugene O’Neill ( The Iceman Cometh ) and Eugène Ionesco ( The Chairs ).

And plays in which ‘nothing happens’ were already established by this point, with conversation and meandering and seemingly aimless ‘action’ dominating other twentieth-century plays. So, what made Beckett’s play so innovative to 1950s audiences?

The key lies not so much in the what as in the how . The other well-known thing about Waiting for Godot is that Vladimir and Estragon are tramps – except that the text never mentions this fact, and Beckett explicitly stated that he ‘saw’ the two characters dressed in bowler hats (otherwise, he said, he couldn’t picture what they should look like): hardly the haggard and unkempt tramps of popular imagination.

Precisely what social class Vladimir and Estragon come from is not known. But it is clear that they are fairly well-educated, given their vocabularies and frames of reference.

And yet, cutting across their philosophical and theological discussions is their plain-speaking and unpretentious attitude to these topics. Waiting for Godot is a play which cuts through pretence and sees the comedy as well as the quiet tragedy in human existence.

Among Beckett’s many influences, we can detect, in the relationship and badinage between Vladimir and Estragon, the importance of music-hall theatre and the comic double act; and vaudeville performers wouldn’t last five minutes up on stage if they indulged in pretentiousness.

In this regard, comparisons with Albert Camus and existentialism make sense in that both are often taken to be more serious than they actually are: or rather, they are deadly serious but also alive to the comedy in everyday desperation and futility.

An important aspect of Camus’ ‘ Myth of Sisyphus ’ is being able to laugh at the absurdity of human endeavour and the repetitive and futile nature of our lives – which all sounds like a pretty good description of Waiting for Godot .

In Camus’ essay, Sisyphus survives the pointless repetition of his task, the rolling of a boulder up a hill only to see it fall to the bottom just as he’s about to reach the top, by seeing the ridiculousness in the situation and laughing at it.

And the discrepancy between what the play addresses, which is often deeply philosophical and complex, and how Beckett’s characters discuss it, is one of the most distinctive features of Waiting for Godot . When the French playwright Jean Anouilh saw the Paris premiere of the play in 1953, he described it as ‘ The Thoughts of Pascal performed by clowns’.

Given the similarity between ‘God’ and ‘Godot’, some critics have analysed the play as being fundamentally about religion: God(ot) is supposed to be turning up (possibly a second coming: Vladimir and Estragon cannot recall whether they’ve met Godot before), but his arrival is always delayed with the promise that he will come ‘tomorrow’.

And in the meantime, all that the play’s two main characters can do is idle away the time, doomed to boredom and repetitive monotony.

The anti-naturalist detail about the leaves on the tree – implying that, in fact, more than a ‘day’ has passed between the first and second act – supports the notion that we should extrapolate the action of the play and consider it as representative of a longer span of time. But to view the play through a narrowly religious lens ignores the broader ‘point’ that Beckett is making.

And what is that point: that everything in life is monotonous, dull, faintly absurd, and above all, pointless? Perhaps, but with the important follow-up point that, despite this futility and absurdity, life continues. Vladimir and Estragon’s decision to leave at the end of the play is contradicted by their physical unwillingness to move, suggesting that they have no intention of ‘leaving’ life.

Indeed, although they agree to end it all and hang themselves from the tree, their attempt to do so ends in absurdly comic farce, with Estragon’s trousers falling down.

They may well make another attempt the next day, but one of the key messages of Waiting for Godot is strikingly similar to what we find in Camus: an ability to see the comic absurdity amidst the tragedy of living, and to ‘go on’ despite everything.

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2 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot”

I just watched the beginning but I can’t get into it. LOL.

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Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 27, 2020 • ( 0 )

It is the peculiar richness of a play like Waiting for Godot  that it opens vistas on so many different perspectives.  It  is  open  to  philosophical,  religious,  and  psychological  interpretations, yet above all it is a poem on time, evanescence, and the mysteriousness of existence, the paradox of change and stability, necessity and absurdity.

—Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd

Two tramps in bowler hats, a desolate country road, a single bare tree—the iconic images of a radically new modern drama confronted the audience at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris on January 5, 1953, at the premiere of En attendant Godot ( Waiting for Godot  ). Written during the winter of 1948–49, it would take Samuel Beckett four years to get it produced. It is easy to see why. As the play’s  first  director,  Roger Blin,  commented,  “Imagine  a  play  that  contains  no action, but characters that have nothing to say to each other.” The main characters—Vladimir and Estragon, nicknamed Didi and Gogo—are awaiting the arrival of Godot, but we never learn why, nor who he is, because he never arrives. The tramps frequently say “Let’s go,” but they never move. We never learn where the road leads nor see the tramps taking it. The play gratifies no expectations and resolves nothing. Instead it detonates the accepted operating principles of drama that we expect to find in a play: a coherent sequence of  actions,  motives,  and  conflicts  leading  to  a  resolution.  It  substitutes  the  core  dramatic  element  of  suspense—waiting—and  forces  the  audience  to  experience the same anticipation and uncertainty of Vladimir and Estragon, while  raising  fundamental  issues  about  the  nature  and  purpose  of  existence  itself,  our  own  elemental  version  of  waiting.  If  modern  drama  originates  in  the 19th century with Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov, Beckett, with Waiting for Godot, extends the implications of their innovations into a radical kind of theatrical experience and method. The theatrical and existential vision of Waiting for Godot   makes it the watershed 20th-century drama—as explosive, groundbreaking, and influential a work as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is for modern poetry and James Joyce’s Ulysses is for modern fiction. From its initial baffling premiere, Waiting for Godot   would be seen, it is estimated, by more than a million people in the next five years and eventually became the most frequently produced modern drama worldwide, entering the collective consciousness with a “Beckett-like landscape” and establishing the illusive Godot as a shorthand image of modern futility and angst.

Like his fellow countryman and mentor Joyce, Beckett oriented himself in  exile  from  his  native  Ireland,  but  unlike  Joyce,  who  managed  to  remain  relatively safe on the fringes of a modern world spinning out of control, Beckett  was  very  much  plunged  into  the  maelstrom.  He was  born  in  Foxrock,  a  respectable suburb of Dublin, to Protestant Anglo-Irish parents. His education at Portora Royal School (where Oscar Wilde had been a student) and at Trinity College, Dublin, where he received his degree in French and Italian, pointed him toward a distinguished academic career. In 1928 Beckett won an exchange  lectureship  at  L’École  normale  supérieure  in  Paris,  where  he  met  Joyce and assisted him in his labors on Finnegans Wake . Beckett returned to Trinity as a lecturer in French but found teaching “grim.” He would state: “I could not bear the absurdity of teaching others what I did not know myself.” In 1932 he left Ireland for good, except for short visits to his family. When World  War  II  broke  out  Beckett  ended  a  visit  home  and  returned  to  Paris,  later stating, “I preferred France in war to Ireland in peace.” During the war Beckett joined the French resistance in Paris, and when his group was infiltrated by a double agent and betrayed to the Gestapo, he was forced to escape to unoccupied France in 1942, where he worked as a farm laborer until the war’s end.

In  1946  Beckett  struggled  to  restart  his  interrupted  and  stalled  literary  career  that  had  produced  a  critical  study  of  Marcel  Proust,  a  collection  of  short stories ( More Pricks Than Kicks ), a volume of poems ( Echo’s Bones ), and two novels ( Murphy and Watt ). The turning point came during a visit to his mother in Foxrock. He would later transfer the epiphany that gave him a new subject and method to the more dramatic setting of the pier in Dún Laoghaire on a stormy night in Krapp’s Last Tape : “Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indigence until that memorable night in March, at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The vision at last. . . . What I suddenly saw then was this . . . that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most.” Krapp’s revelation breaks off, but Beckett himself completed his sentence, saying “that the dark I have always struggled to keep under” was “my most precious ally.” As Beckett biographer James Knowlson summarizes, Beckett’s insight meant that he would “draw henceforward on his own inner world for his subjects; outside reality  would  be  refracted  through  the  filter  of  his  own  imagination;  inner  desires  and  needs  would  be  allowed  a  much  greater  freedom  of  expression;  rational  contradictions  would  be  allowed  in;  and  the  imagination  would  be allowed to create alternative worlds to those of conventional reality.” Beckett would thereby find the way to bypass the particular to deal directly with the universal. His fiction and plays would not be social or psychological but onto-logical. To mine those inner recesses, Beckett would reverse the centrifugal direction of most writers to contain and comprehend the world for the centripetal, of reduction down to essentials. Beckett, who had assisted Joyce in the endlessly proliferating Finnegans Wake, would overturn the method of his mentor. “I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, in control of one’s material,” Beckett would observe. “He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.” This realization required a means of presentation that Beckett found in minimalism and composition in French, which he found “easier to write without style.” Restricted to a voice and its consciousness,  Beckett  would  eliminate  the  conventional  narrative  requirements of specificity of time and place and elaborate background for characters and a complex sequence of causes and effects to form his plots. In Beckett’s work the atmosphere of futility and stagnation around which Chekhov devised his plays and stories has become pervasive. The world is drained of meaning; human  relationships  are  reduced  to  tensions  between  hope  and  despair  in  which consciousness itself is problematic. Beckett’s protagonists, who lack the possibility of significant action, are paralyzed or forced to repeat an unchanging  condition.  Beckett  compresses  his  language  and  situations  down  to  the  level of elemental forces without the possibility of escaping from the predicament of the basic absurdity of existence.

Returning to Paris after his epiphany, Beckett began what he called “the siege in the room”: his most sustained and prolific period of writing that in five years produced the plays Eleutheria, Waiting for Godot , and Endgame ; the novel  trilogy  Molloy,  Malone  Dies,  and  The  Unnamable;  and  the  short  stories  published under the title Stories and Texts for Nothing. Beckett stated that Waiting for Godot began “as a relaxation, to get away from the awful prose I was writing at the time.” It gave dramatic form to the intense interior explorations of his fiction.  The  play’s  setting  is  nonspecific  but  symbolically  suggestive  of  the  modern  wasteland  as  the  play’s  protagonists,  Vladimir  and  Estragon,  engage in chatter derived equally from metaphysics and the music hall while they  await  the  arrival  of  Godot,  who  never  comes.  What  Godot  represents  (Beckett  remarked:  “If  I  knew,  I  would  have  said  so  in  the  play,”  and  “If  by  Godot  I  had  meant  God,  I  would  have  said  God,  not  Godot.”)  is  far  less  important than the defining condition of fruitless and pointless waiting that the play dramatizes. Beckett explores on stage the implications of a world in which nothing happens, in which a desired revelation and meaningful resolution are endlessly deferred.  At  art’s  core  is  a  fundamental  ordering  of  the  world, but Beckett’s art is based on the world’s ultimate incomprehensibility. “I think anyone nowadays,” Beckett once said, “who pays the slightest attention to his own experience finds it the experience of a non-knower, a non-caner.” By powerfully staging radical uncertainty and the absurdity of futile waiting, Godot epitomizes the operating assumptions of the theater of the absurd.

The  most  repeated  critique  of  Waiting  for  Godot  is  voiced  in  Irish  critic  Vivian Mercier’s succinct summary: “Nothing happens, twice.” The play, sub-titled A Tragicomedy in Two Acts, does not, in the words of Martin Esslin, “tell a  story;  it  explores  a  static  situation”  that  is  encapsulated  by  the  words  of  Estragon: “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.” In act 1, Didi and Gogo await the anticipated arrival of Godot, to whom they have made “a kind of prayer,” a “vague supplication” for something unspecified that Godot has agreed to consider. However, it is by no means certain whether this is the right place or day for the meeting. To pass the time they consider hanging themselves (“It’d give us an erection”), but the only available tree seems too frail to hold them, and they cannot agree who should go first. Another pair arrives: Lucky, with a rope around his neck, loaded down with a bag, picnic basket,  stool,  and  great  coat,  being  whipped  on  by  the  domineering  Pozzo,  who claims to be a landowner taking Lucky to a fair to sell him. They halt for Pozzo to eat, and he asks Gogo and Didi if they would like to be entertained by Lucky’s “thinking,” which turns out to be a long nonsensical monologue. After Pozzo and Lucky depart, a boy enters, addresses Vladimir as Mr. Albert, and delivers the message that Mr. Godot will not be coming this evening but will surely come tomorrow. After the boy exits, Vladimir and Estragon also decide to leave but make no move to do so.

Act  2  takes  place  apparently  the  next  day  at  the  same  time  and  place,  although the tree now has four or five leaves. Again Vladimir and Estragon begin  their  vigil,  passing  the  time  by  exchanging  questions,  contradictions,  insults, and hats, as well as pretending to be Pozzo and Lucky, until the originals  arrive.  However,  Pozzo  is  now  blind  and  bumps  into  Lucky,  knocking  them both down. After debating whether they should help them get up, Didi and Gogo also find themselves on the ground, unable to rise, with Vladimir announcing,  “we’ve  arrived  .  .  .  we  are  men.”  Eventually,  they  regain  their  footing, supporting Pozzo between them. Pozzo has no recollection of their previous encounter, and when asked what he and Lucky do when they fall and there is no one to help them, Pozzo says: “We wait till we can get up. Then we go on.” When Didi asks if Lucky can “think” again for them before they leave, Pozzo  reveals  that  Lucky  is  now  “dumb”—“he  can’t  even  groan.”  Vladimir  wonders about their transformation since yesterday, but Pozzo insists time is a meaningless concept:

Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born,  one  day  we  shall  die,  the  same  day,  the  same  second,  is  that  not  enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.

Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?

Estragon: Yes, let’s go.

They do not move.

Beckett generates meaning in Waiting for Godot   through image, repetition, and counterpoint. In their bowler hats and pratfalls, Vladimir and Estragon are versions of Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, tragic clowns poised between despair and hope. Act 2 repeats the sequence of action of act 1 but deepens the absurdity as well as the significance of their Waiting for Godot  . Unlike Pozzo and Lucky, whose relationship parodies the master-slave dynamic and a sadomasochistic conception of existence in which death is the only outcome of birth, Vladimir and Estragon complement each other and live in hope for Godot’s arrival and the  revelation  and  resolution  it  implies  (“Tonight  perhaps  we  shall  sleep  in  his place, in the warmth, our bellies full, on the straw. It is worth waiting for that, is it not?”). The hope that Godot might come, that purpose is possible even in the face of almost certain disappointment, is their sustaining illusion and the play’s ultimate comic affirmation. As Vladimir explains, “What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are Waiting for Godot   to come. . . . We have kept our appointment and that’s an end to that. We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?” To which Estragon replies: “Billions.” By the comic calculus of Waiting for Godot   continuing to believe in the absence of  the  possibility  of  belief  is  true  heroism  and  the  closest  we  get  to  human  fulfillment. Beckett’s play makes clear that the illusions that prevent us from confronting the core truth of human existence must be stripped away, whether in the storm scene of act 3 of King Lear when bare unaccommodated man is revealed or here on a “Country road. A tree. Evening.”

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Waiting for Godot

Samuel beckett, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Waiting for Godot is a prime example of what has come to be known as the theater of the absurd. The play is filled with nonsensical lines, wordplay, meaningless dialogue, and characters who abruptly shift emotions and forget everything, ranging from their own identities to what happened yesterday. All of this contributes to an absurdist humor throughout the play. However, this humor is often uncomfortably mixed together with tragic or serious content to make a darker kind of comedy. Estragon refers to "billions of others," who have been killed, and describes being beaten by an anonymous "they." Lucky (whose ill-fitting name is itself darkly comic) is treated horribly and physically abused on-stage. And Vladimir and Estragon talk nonchalantly and pleasantly about suicide. All this has a discomforting effect on the audience, who is not sure how to react to this absurd mixture of comedy and tragedy, seriousness and playfulness. In act one, Vladimir says, "one daren't even laugh any more," and his comment could apply well to the audience of Beckett's play, who don't know whether to laugh or to cringe at the events on-stage. The absurdity caused by the seeming mismatch between characters' tones and the content of their speech can be seen as a reaction to a world emptied of meaning and significance. If the world is meaningless, it makes no sense to see it as comic or tragic, good or bad. Beckett thus presents an eerie play that sits uneasily on the border between tragedy and comedy, in territory one can only call the absurd.

Humor and the Absurd ThemeTracker

Humor and the Absurd Quotes in Waiting for Godot

One daren't even laugh any more. Dreadful privation. Merely smile. (He smiles suddenly from ear to ear, keeps smiling, ceases as suddenly.) It's not the same thing. Nothing to be done.

What do we do now? Wait. Yes, but while waiting. What about hanging ourselves? Hmm. It'd give us an erection.

To Godot? Tied to Godot! What an idea! No question of it. (Pause.) For the moment.

You are human beings none the less. (He puts on his glasses.) As far as one can see. (He takes off his glasses.) of the same species as myself. (He bursts into an enormous laugh.) Of the same species as Pozzo! Made in God's image!

Why he doesn't make himself comfortable? Let's try and get this clear. Has he not the right to? Certainly he has. It follows that he doesn't want to. There's reasoning for you.

The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. (He laughs.) Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not unhappier than its predecessors. (Pause.) Let us not speak well of it either. (Pause.) Let us not speak of it at all.

(to Lucky.) How dare you! It's abominable! Such a good master! Crucify him like that! After so many years! Really!

He thinks? Certainly. Aloud. He even used to think very prettily once, I could listen to him for hours. Now... (he shudders).

He used to dance the farandole, the fling, the brawl, the jig, the fandango, and even the hornpipe. He capered. For joy. Now that's the best he can do. Do you know what he calls it? The Scapegoat's Agony. The Hard Stool. The Net. He thinks he's entangled in a net.

Then adieu. Adieu. Adieu. Adieu. Silence. No one moves. Adieu. Adieu. Adieu. Silence.

Let's go. We can't. Why not? We're waiting for Godot.

Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won't come this evening but surely tomorrow.

Tell him... (he hesitates) ... tell him you saw us. (Pause.) You did see us, didn't you?

Well, shall we go? Yes, let's go. They do not move.

Say, I am happy. I am happy. So am I. So am I. We are happy. We are happy. (Silence.) What do we do now, now that we are happy? Wait for Godot.

The best thing would be to kill me, like the other. What other? (Pause.) What other? Like billions of others.

Suppose we got up to begin with? No harm trying. They get up. Child's play. Simple question of will-power.

Well? Shall we go? Yes, let's go. They do not move.

Samuel Beckett

"waiting for godot" as a theatre of the absurd.

Martin Esslin, the critic responsible for coining the term “Theatre of the Absurd,” defines absurdity as “that which has no purpose, goal, or objective”. The movement emerged in France after the horrors of World War II as a rebellion against the basic beliefs and values in traditional culture and literature. Almost all of the playwrights of The Theatre of the Absurd share the existentialist philosophy of absurdity and nothingness. This theater, however, "has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in being — that is, in terms of concrete stage images of the absurdity of existence." These writers flout all standards by which drama has been judged for many centuries. In their plays there is no particular attention spent developing a recognizable plot, no detailed characterization, and no readily definable theme. This bizarre rejection of any recognizable pattern or development gave birth to the term Literature of the Absurd.

Against the backdrop of conventional theatre, Waiting for Godot represents irony in extremes . Unlike conventional forms in which everything on the stage exists for a larger purpose, the world of Godot is a world without meaning: bare in both matter and form. With its extreme paucity of action, Godot confronts the theatre-goer with an experience of failed expectations: nothing happens, Godot never comes. In this sense, Godot presents a brilliant simulacrum of real life in which desire is continually frustrated by the boring facts of the everyday.

The haunting image of despairing bumpkins hobnobbing around a stage barren except for the lone, skeleton-like tree, creates a situation of powerful metaphorical significance. The characters are so featureless, so context-less, that it is nearly impossible to view them as representations of empirical entities; rather, they appear almost as symbolic abstractions. In his seminal essay on the subject, Esslin argues that the Theatre of the Absurd shares a kinship with the mystery plays of medieval Europe for this very reason— because these plays often portray characters and situations too vague and generalized to signify any particular thing. Rather, the complete impotence of Vladimir and Estragon is suggestive of the failure of human thought, in the macrocosm of human existence at large, as well as in the individual mind.

Without any plot development or sense of contingency, the play is comprised of discrete activities—walking, talking, falling down—that fail to resolve into a coherent drama.  Vladimir and Estragon exist perpetually in the moment. Although they have some knowledge of things outside their immediate experience—they can recite songs and reference the Bible—this is all timeless, abstract data. When it comes to relating events to their present situation they are at a loss. References to past experiences like climbing the Eiffel Tower and picking grapes along the Rhone seem impossibly distant from the subtracted world in which they appear; it seems more likely that these memories are not even their own, or from another life. Thus, only dimly aware of their relation to yesterday and tomorrow, Vladimir and Estragon inhabit a world of inscrutable repetitiveness; and they pass the time like everyone else: walking, talking, and falling down.

Waiting for Godot” is an absurd play for not only its plot is loose but its characters are also just mechanical puppets with their incoherent colloquy. And above than all, its theme is unexplained. It is devoid of characterization and motivation. So far as its dialogue technique is concerned, it is purely absurd as there is no witty repartee and pointed dialogue. What a reader or spectator hears is simply the incoherent babbling which does not have any clear and meaningful ideas. Nothing special happens in the play, nor do we observe any significant change in setting. The situation almost remains unchanged and an enigmatic vein runs throughout the play. “Nothing happens, nobody comes … nobody goes, it’s awful!”

Godot remains a mystery and curiosity still holds a sway. The wait continues; the human contacts remain unsolved; the problem of existence remains meaningless, futile and purposeless. All this makes it an absurd play.

Samuel Beckette                 Waiting for Godot

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“Waiting for Godot” as an Absurd Play | Absurd Theater Characteristics

Martin Esslin wrote a book titled “Theatre of the Absurd” that was published in year 1961. It dealt with the dramatists who belonged to a movement called “Absurd Theater” though it was not regular. Samuel Beckett was one of those dramatists who had largest contribution in “Absurd Theater”. His play “Waiting for Godot” also belonged to the same category and was called absurd play.

Absurd Theater:

There was no regular movement regarding theater of absurd rather it was a group of people who wrote plays without following the conventional rules. In simple words, performance of plays that were written by group of unconventional writers was called theater of absurd.

No clear definition of theater of absurd is available. However, Martin Esslin provided an informal definition of absurd plays and “absurd theater” in following words:

“If a good play must have a cleverly constructed story, these [plays of absurd] have no story or plot to speak of; a good play is judged by subtlety of characterization and motivation, these are often without recognizable characters and present the audience with almost mechanical puppets; a good play has to have a fully explained theme, which is neatly exposed and finally solved, these often have neither a beginning nor an end; if a good play is to hold the mirror up to nature and portray the manners and mannerisms of the age in finely observed sketches, these seem often to be reflections of dreams and nightmares; if a good play relies on witty repartee and pointed dialogue, these often consist of incoherent babblings.” Martin Esslin on absurd plays

Characteristics of Absurd Theater:

From the above said remarks it is crystal clear that absurd plays were entirely different from traditional plays. These remarks provide us following characteristics of absurd theater:

• No story or plot
• No characterization and motivation
• Neither a proper beginning nor ending
• Unexplained themes
• Imitation of dreams or nightmares instead of nature
• Useless dialogues

“Waiting for Godot” as an Absurd Play:

“Waiting for Godot” fulfills every requirement of an absurd play. It has no story, no characterization, no beginning nor any end, unexplained themes, imitation of dreams and nightmares and above all it contains useless dialogues.

No story or plot:

“Waiting for Godot” does not tell any story nor does it has a plot. The play starts with waiting and ends with it. Characters do not go anywhere. They stand still in front of audience and do nothing except passing the ball. They talk and pass the time. The play lacks action. Actions of characters are not related to plot but to themselves. Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot and audience perceive that perhaps real story of the play will start after Godot’s arrival but Godot does not appear on stage nor is he introduced to the audience. Eventually, play ends with waiting. In this ways, “Waiting for Godot” fulfills first requirement of an absurd play.

“Waiting for Godot” is Absurd Play due to Lack of Characterization :

We don’t know past of the characters. They are not introduced to the audience. We know only their names and their miserable situation. Their motifs are unclear. Although it is explicit that they are waiting for Godot yet it is not told to the audience that what purpose Godot will serve if he comes. Hence, lack of characterization proves that “Waiting of Godot” is a play of absurd theater.

No Beginning and End:

It has no beginning nor has any end. It starts with a situation and ends with it. Both the acts start and end in same way. For instance, when characters come on stage they reveal their purpose. They say they are waiting but Godot does not come and the act ends with waiting. Second act is also the copy of first act with minor differences. The play goes on and eventually ends with wait. Hence, there is no proper start of the play nor does it has a proper end. It is a journey from nothingness to nothingness as observed by an eminent critics.

It is a play in which nothing happens twice…. “Nothing happens, nobody comes … nobody goes, it’s awful!”.

Fulfillment of this requirement also proves that “Waiting for Godot” is an absurd play.

Useless Dialogues Make “Waiting for Godot” as an Absurd Play:

Most of the dialogues of this play serve no purpose. Incoherent babbling is also important ingredient of theater of absurd as mentioned by Esslin. Whole play is based on delivery of dialogues but most of them have no apparent meanings. Every dialogue is full of symbols. Every word refers something in hidden meaning but it lacks the interest of audience because it lacks action.

Dialogues create action in every play. Action looses its importance without worthy dialogues. In case of “Waiting for Godot”, no action has been presented, therefore, dialogues are boring and they are written just to pass the ball. Thus, they are meant to pass the time. Word “nothing” has been repeated numerously in the play. It actually indicates nothingness in it. Thus, dialogues of the play are nothing but incoherent babbling. “Waiting for Godot” can be called an absurd play due to this trait of absurd theater.

Unexplained Themes:

Unclear themes also make “Waiting for Godot” a play of absurd theater. Audience do not observe any obvious theme in the play. Superiority of a play is always dependent on its themes. “Waiting for Godot” has no obvious theme. If there is any, it is hidden. Moreover, it presents individualistic vision of the writer. There is an effect of alienation in the play with respect to themes.

Themes of “Waiting for Godot” | Thematic Concept of Samuel Beckett

Imitation of Nightmares:

This play does not hold the mirror up to nature. It does not portray the manners and mannerisms of the ages. Esslin is true in his definition of theater of absurd. This play “seem[s] often to be reflection of dreams and nightmares”.

At last but not the least, “Waiting for Godot” is entirely unconventional play. Samuel Becket violated all dramatic conventions. Indeed, every ingredient of theater of absurd has been fulfilled by him. Regardless of that this play is successful. He wrote this play to break the rules of traditional dramatists. “Waiting for Godot” completes every factor of theater of absurd, therefore, it can successfully be called the play of absurd.