Meet Mr.Godot
Review of Waiting for Godot
“Until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,--\'Wait and hope.\'”1 This is the famous sentence from the last chapter of The Count of Monte Cristo.We can find that Alexandre Dumas suggested us a truth of life.To wait, do not rush into the irrational emotion and indulge ourselves in the instinct of human nature and to hope, as the misery would be gone and we haven’t experience the best that life has to offer.Here he showed us a positive perspective of life: we are waiting for hope and finally we can get salvation.While in Waiting for Godot, its core also is wait and hope but the author is comparatively more negative because of the lack of hope and the frustrations that fill the dialogue.Waiting for Godot is depreing and inexplicable for it’s a story about random oppreion, brutality, and dreams deferred by harsh realities.
\"Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it\'s awful!\" 2That phrase, said by one of the main characters of the play, somehow sums up the whole plot of this short tragicomedy in two acts.The play starts with two men, Vladimir and Estragon, sitting on a lonely road.They are both waiting for Godot.They don\'t know why they are waiting for him, but they think that his arrival will change things for the better.The problem is that he doesn\'t come, although a kid does so and says Godot will eventually arrive.Pozzo and his servant Lucky, two other characters that pa by while our protagonists are waiting for Godot, and add another bizarre touch to an already surreal story, in which nothing seems to happen and discuions between the characters don\'t make much sense.Neverthele, maybe that is exactly the point that the author wanted to make.He was one of the most accomplished exponents of the \"Theatre of the Absurd\", that wanted to highlight the lack of purpose and meaning in an universe without God.
Not everyone has a God, but who doesn\'t have a Godot? Does Godot, the person that Vladimir and Estragon endlely wait, symbolize God? According to Beckett, when hard-preed to answer that question, \"If I knew who Godot was, I would have said so in the play.\"3 Whether Pozzo is Godot? According to the answer that Beckett to Colin Duckworth, he isn’t.4 Is Godot hope? It’s hard to identify.So we don\'t know.The result is a highly unusual play that poses many questions, but doesn\'t answer them.I think Godot here is not a real person.He is the symbolism of hope and belief.In the play, Vladimir and Estragon waited for Godot everyday and they will still wait for him all their life, with disquietude and expectation, from which I can only see the void of life, but may be it is the real life.From my point of view, it is what Samuel
Beckett wanted to show to the public.Human beings’ life is based on endle wait, which is always full of desperation, uncertainty, and perturbation; meanwhile we can just see a slight light of hope which is hard to reach.From a philosophic view, there are certain fundamental questions that every human being must come to terms with if they are to take their subjective existences seriously and with intrinsic value.Questions such as death, the meaning of human existence and the place of (or lack of) God in that existence are among them.By and large, the theories of existentialism aert that conscious reality is very complex and without an \"objective\" or universally known value: the individual must create value by affirming it and living it, not by simply talking about it or philosophize it in the mind.The play may be seen to touch on all of these iues.Existentialism means that existence precedes eence.So, your eence (who you are, what you think, and how you choose to interact with others and the world) is created manifested after you exist.You are not predetermined (aside from genetic predispositions, etc.).Your eence is your creation.There is great freedom there, but also great responsibility and with that responsibility, there can be anxiety because the choices you make manifest that eence, or meaning in life.In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon (and the audience) are duped, thinking that the climax, epiphany, or any significant meaning will come when Godot arrives.To the contrary, the meaning is the interaction of the characters as they wait.They are waiting for someone or some sign to give some meage; when, existentially speaking, it is the waitingthat is life itself.The existentialist would treat the waiting as the significance and meaning in life: the degree and profundity of that meaning is up to each individual.Vladimir and Estragon are waiting, even clinging to an idea of something more; instead, they should be Godot: in other words, they should take responsibility for their own happine.So we are the master of our life, and we should control our life by ourselves not just wait for somebody else to help.Life is filled with wait, but we must wait to go.Each of us is the Godot of ourselves.
Beckett\'s achievement comes from his ability to link such nihilistic sentiments to extremely comic moments, and it is the humor that carries the reader or the theatergoer through what would otherwise be an unbearably cynical play.These lines of the play have become representative of modern man\'s ambivalence towards a cruel and uncaring world, which will always remind the people of the question whether you are waiting for Godot who is always there in your life.
So don’t wait for Godot, because you have already met him!
07级英语师范四班蔡一波
Notes:
[1].From The Count of Monte Cristo : Chapter 117.The Fifth of October.
[2].From Waiting for Godot
[3].From SB to Barney Roet, 18 October 1954 (Syracuse).Quoted in Knowlson, J., Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), p 412
[4].From Colin Duckworth\'s introduction to En attendant Godot (London: George G Harrap & Co, 1966), lx.Quoted in Cohn, R., From Desire to Godot (London: Calder Publications; New York: Riverrun Pre, 1998), p 150
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