Chapter 2

Approaching the play

4 The drama of unknowingness

At evening on a country road, bare but for a low mound and a
spindly tree, two men named Vladimir and Estragon – part tramp,
part clown, of indeterminate age – talk fitfully about their thwarted
lives and expectantly of an appointment to meet someone named
Godot. While they pass the time and wait, two strangers appear,
an imperious landowner called Pozzo and at the end of a rope his
animal-like servant Lucky. After a bizarre, increasingly mystifying
conversation (highlighted by Lucky’s opaque and frenzied tirade),
the master and his man move on. A boy appears to announce that Mr
Godot will not come this evening but ‘surely tomorrow’; and when
night falls, Vladimir and Estragon contemplate suicide, decide to
leave, but at the first act curtain they do not move. In Act II the basic
action is similar: the next day, same time same place, Vladimir and
Estragon pass the time and wait; Pozzo and Lucky – now respectively
blind and dumb – again arrive and depart; the boy reappears to
deliver essentially the same message (Mr Godot will not come this
evening but ‘surely tomorrow’); and after again considering suicide,
the two men prepare to go but at the final curtain do not move.
To describe Waiting for Godot in this fashion is of course to say
almost nothing about its originality and distinction and to ignore
nearly everything of consequence about the way it makes itself felt on
the stage. Yet such a summary points to something essential for an
understanding of why many early theatregoers perceived the work
as systematically symbolic. Stripped to its crude outline, Beckett’s
play certainly does sound like an allegory: a dramatic action in
which events, characters, and settings represent abstract or spiri-
tual meanings. Even for a French audience, the name Godot will

19
20 WAITING FOR GODOT

be perceived to have God in it; and the cyclical plot – on successive

days two men wait for and are denied an encounter with a shad-
owy figure of authority – is very close to fable. A two-act structure
so assuredly symmetrical, pairs of complementary characters in no
particular place at no particular time – how can one resist wanting
to interpret this narrative in terms of ‘something else’?
Then, too, the dialogue has several conspicuous allusions to
events in the life of Christ as recounted in the New Testament. Six
or seven minutes into the play, Vladimir asks Estragon if he has ever
read the Bible, particularly the accounts in the Gospels of the two
thieves, and when his friend says no, he proceeds to lecture him on
the mysteries of salvation and damnation as they are exemplified in
the most resonant of all such stories. Later on, Estragon compares
himself to Christ; and when Vladimir observes, ‘We are not saints,
but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as
much?’, some listeners are likely to note an allusion to the parable
of the Wise and the Foolish Virgins (Matthew 24, 25). Throughout
the play there is much talk about prayers and supplications, of goats
and sheep, of the beauty of the way and the goodness of the wayfarer,
and of a personal God with a long white beard.
The title, the sense of universal present time, the shape of the plot
and of the characters, the often pointed and tantalizing allusions –
these obviously invite allegorical interpretation, and for many play-
goers and readers the invitation has proved irresistible. It is also
important to remember that when Waiting for Godot was first per-
formed in the 1950s, arguments about systems of meaning were
often influenced by a large body of philosophical and fictional writ-
ing generally known as existentialist, which seemed at first glance to
have marked similarities to Beckett’s work. Although not a cohesive
school, the existentialist writers were preoccupied with many of the
same vital issues, most notably the problem of discovering belief in
the face of radical twentieth-century perceptions of the meaning-
lessness or absurdity of human life.
A characteristic existentialist response was to accept nothing-
ness, absence, and absurdity as givens and then to explore the
way human beings might self-consciously form their essence in the
course of the lives they choose to lead. The origin of the inclination
for transcendence was little agreed upon by such writers as Martin
 Approaching the play 21
Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Karl Jaspers; but as
Richard Shepard has described it, ‘a radically negative experience
is seen to contain the embryo of a positive development – though
the psychological and philosophical content of that development is
extremely diverse’ (Fowler, p. 82).
The pervasiveness of existentialist thinking in the 1940s and
1950s was so great that any work about an individual’s quest for pur-
pose and order in life, especially in relation to an absent or a present
divinity, was likely to be discussed in the context of current controver-
sies about existence, essence, personal freedom, responsibility, and
commitment. Many philosophers who were not existentialists were
also absorbed by these same questions. For instance, Simone Weil,
who coincidentally had been a student at l’Ecole normale supérieure
when Beckett lectured there, published a widely-read book, Attente
de Dieu (Waiting for God), just at the time that Beckett and Roger Blin
were trying to stage En attendant Godot. Yet there seems to have been
no direct connection with or influence of either writer on the other.
The issues were in the air.
To the ongoing existentialist arguments about meaning and belief
in a profoundly sceptical time, Beckett’s enigmatic yet reverberating
play seemed in the mid-1950s to be making a notable contribution.
So it is hardly surprising that many people tried to define concretely
what they thought the playwright was saying about some of the
major subjects of the debate. Yet, comprehensible as the impulse
was to interpret Waiting for Godot allegorically, it now is clear that
theatregoers were too persistently trying to link the particular provo-
cations of the play to some specific system or structure of thought
existing outside the work itself, as if such systems or structures would
explain what this strange work was fundamentally ‘about’.
Beyond question, the teasing title, the fable-like action and the
religious allusions are essential for an understanding of the play,
but not finally in the way some avid interpreters had originally
conceived. As Beckett once told Colin Duckworth, ‘Christianity is a
mythology with which I am perfectly familiar, so I naturally use it’
(En attendant Godot, p. lvii); and to another interviewer, he remarked:
‘I’m not interested in any system. I can’t see any trace of any system
anywhere.’ Waiting for Godot resists not only systems but abstract
ideas as well. ‘If I could have expressed the subject of [my work] in
22 WAITING FOR GODOT

philosophical terms’, Beckett once said, ‘I wouldn’t have had any

reason to write [it]’ (Graver and Federman, pp. 217, 219).
Yet even if one agrees that Waiting for Godot is not allegorical in the
sense that events and characters relate overall to specific external
systems of thought and belief (classical myth, Christianity, Cartesian
philosophy, Hegelianism, Marxism, or existentialism), there is no
doubt that the details and shape of the work itself keep forcing us to
generalize about its significance. The major questions then become
these: how and to what purpose is Beckett using Christianity and
other systems of beliefs and ideas ‘as mythology’? What if any gen-
eralizations can be reliably made about a work that is so cunningly
shaped to subvert generalization and to avoid definition?
At this point it is helpful to go back to Beckett’s own insistence
that Waiting for Godot is designed to give artistic expression to ‘the
irrational state of unknowingness wherein we exist, this mental
weightlessness which is beyond reason’. Following this lead, it would
be advantageous to begin talking about the play not as a structure
of ideas, but as the dramatization of what it is like and what it means
to exist in a state of radical unknowingness. Approached in this
way, the situation in which the characters find themselves and how
they respond moment by moment in gesture and dialogue are more
absorbing and suggestive than any overall ‘meaning’ that can be
formulated in discursive terms. This is not to deny the importance
of ideas in the play (as we shall soon see), but rather to confirm Hugh
Kenner’s observation that a Beckett play contains ideas but that no
idea contains the play.

5 The caged dynamic

Beckett dramatizes doubt and unknowingness in countless ways.
When Godot opens, the accustomed contours of realistic theatre
have already been thoroughly eroded, and much that we might
expect to be told about the characters and their situation is denied
to us. Where are these people, and who are they? What are they
doing, and why? Although the protagonists have been identified in
the cast list of characters as Vladimir and Estragon, they later call
each other Didi and Gogo and answer to other names as well; and in
any case, what are we to make of names so atypical and unfamiliar,