‘Waiting for Godot’: A Play About Nothing
A review of ‘Waiting for Godot’, by Samuel Beckett; Faber and Faber, 1953.
Is it a spoiler to say that the eponymous Godot in Samuel Beckett’s play never comes? I hope not. (This is the problem with classic literature. Everyone assumes everyone else has read everything, because no one wants to admit that she hasn’t.) At any rate, in this case at least, I dare say it can hardly be a spoiler, since it just about the only thing about the play that everyone knows: the characters wait for Godot—and Godot never comes.
It is a play in which, as the critic Vivian Mercier put it, ‘nothing happens, twice’. Two tramps, Estragon and Vladimir, stand around on a barren stage, waiting for the arrival of the mysterious Godot. They talk, they argue, they reminisce; they invent games to pass the time. Across two acts resembling one other like warped reflections in a broken mirror, the ragged, weary protagonists cling to the act of waiting as though it redeems their pointless existences. They are visited by the grotesque Pozzo, a bullying master, and his slave, Lucky, whose name reads like a cosmic joke. Dialogue flows in absurd, repetitive, meandering ways, veering from banter to despair. There is no resolution. The stage directions themselves make this plain: ‘A country road. A tree. Evening.’ Thus the play opens.
It is a play in which, as the critic Vivian Mercier put it, ‘nothing happens, twice’.
What are we waiting for? This is the question with which we are faced. It isn’t obvious. Godot may be God; but he may also be salvation, or death, or just the promise of meaning, eternally deferred. Beckett’s sparse, unforgiving prose and minimalist staging strip life, the human experience, down to its bones, forcing us to face the absurdity of existence without distraction. Throughout the play the central players say, like a mantra, that there is ‘nothing to be done’ and ‘nothing to do.’ Per T.S. Eliot: ‘Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about.’ As Vladimir later puts it, they are ‘bored to death’.
One of Beckett’s abiding concerns was this very ‘nothing’ that the characters cite. In Godot, absence hangs in the air like smoke, and Estragon and Vladimir’s many non-sequiturs and silences, their stray spoken thoughts, capture the rhythms of human cognition in all its apparent randomness, reflecting the meagre attempts of us moderns to distract ourselves from the terrifying recognition that there is really nothing. One could say that what Waiting for Godot is ‘about’, fundamentally (I use the scare-quotes because such descriptions are always limiting) is — nothing. The tramps wait for nothing, talk about nothing, do nothing. And nothing happens. The effect is unsettling, for it creates a pervasive atmosphere of futility. If our existence really is absurd, then perhaps, per Camus, ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.’ (Please don’t do that, by the way, reader. Camus himself concluded our task was to live fully in spite of life’s absurdity.)
One could say that what Waiting for Godot is ‘about’, fundamentally, is — nothing.
For Beckett, that life is or might be meaningless is not to say we ought to turn our backs on it. One might argue—and I like this interpretation—that the absurdity lies chiefly in the waiting. Let us not sit around, waiting for meaning to find us. Let us go out and get it. Or at least, let us laugh at our condition, even as we tremble in the face of it. Or let us find others with whom to share our lives, whether or not they mean something. For Estragon and Vladimir have each other. They mean something to one another. Waiting for Godot points to the ties that keep us from sinking into the void: companionship, play, routine and a healthy stubbornness, a refusal to give up.
The play is so involving, which is to say that we, like its characters, find ourselves waiting around for an event, for some relief from the waiting, that it might not be to your taste. It is not an easy sell: ‘come and see a play about nothing and experience the existential boredom of its characters.’ It is bewildering and frustrating, but also quite moving, if only because Waiting for Godot holds up a mirror to ourselves, trying manfully to keep calm and carry on in a universe that seems entirely indifferent to our existence—at least, on one reading. We humans ‘give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.’ Faced with this stark reality, just to endure, says Beckett, is to triumph.
