Waiting for Godot
In this play, two men wait for a person named Godot- who
never comes. Through the play, we learn he has a white beard, and that he
‘doesn’t do much in particular’. However, in this play though the focus seems
to be on these two men waiting for Godot, in between, they eat and sing and
dance and talk endlessly about why they’re waiting and other things. One of the
two men is Erasmund, affectionately called Gogo, and Vladimir, nicknamed Didi. Pozzo
and Lucky are a master and his slave respectively that come in between. A boy
comes, also, to tell them that Godot will come the next day. The play takes
place over two days and references are made to having done this before,
indicating they have been waiting for a long time.
I think that the fact that the men, despite having said they
will leave, never do, is testimony to humanity’s extreme stubbornness and
ability to stick with a lost cause. I think their wait, and what they do in
between, symbolizes human life: in all our life, we are basically waiting for
our next meal, waiting for the holidays, waiting for graduation, waiting for
our payday, and eventually, waiting for death. They dance and sing and laugh
and talk and embrace and eat and do all the things a human would do in his/her
lifetime. I think that the coming of Godot symbolizes the end of life for these
men. And when then you say their life is pointless, well, then, ours is too.
It’s what we do to give it meaning that counts. And the men have given it
meaning, the base meaning: waiting.
Vladimir and Erasmund make frequent references to having
seen someone before or heard something before, to make us think that they have
been going through this same routine for a long time. For me, this is another
testimony to the monotony and routine flavor that most of our lives have taken
on: each day, each week, is just the repetition of the last, with little or
nothing to distinguish one from the other. If you think of it that way, the
play is encouraging us to differentiate our lives, our days.
The four characters (possibly five, if you count the boy)
each represent a type of human. Pozzo represents the rich and famous and so
bossy and overlording. Vladimir is the inquisitive type, why, what, where? If
we had to place him in our lives, I’d say he’d be a scientist. Erasmund represents the passive, the people
who watch life go by and think, Oh, what pretty clouds. The people easily bent
to a will, a large majority of the population. Lucky is the enslaved, the
downtrodden. And the boy is representing all the sweet, innocent, little
children.
Lucky, as a character, is very intriguing. His ‘think’,
where he repeated himself and used a lot of long words, represents a side of
him we haven’t seen before. When he moves it is a like a weary person,
shuffling, stooping, we get the image life has thrown all its weight on his
shoulders. Also, on the matter why he doesn’t drop his load when he gets the
chance, I think it is because he knows no other way to do it. It is so
ingrained in his way of life I believe that it would be impossible to take away
the constant weight of the briefcase from his hand. Perhaps it is an analogy
for the constant weight of life’s burdens and how we can never drop them.
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