Character
Two weary actors strut and fret a couple of hours on the stage, filling the time with spontaneous, inconsequential speech. The dialogue is very short, simple and leads nowhere. Idle discourse follows Vladimir’s ‘Let us not waste our time in idle discourse!’
Unlike plays that begin with everything to be done to develop the characters (and narrative), for Beckett’s characters there is ‘Nothing to be done.’ They wait, meet travellers who pass on, and then are left waiting for an appointment that is not kept. What action there is comes to nothing. No conflict. No resolution. ‘Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!’ cries Estragon.
When Pozzo enquires ‘Who are you?’ Vladimir informatively replies, ‘We are men.’ A few moments earlier he asserted ‘vehemently’ that ‘at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not.’ Their purpose, he insists, is to ‘represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us’.
Can we get to know them as individuals? Vladimir does introduce himself as Vladimir in his first speech, but Estragon always calls him ‘Didi’, the Boy calls him Mr Albert, Vladimir always calls Estragon ‘Gogo’, and Pozzo guesses simply ‘You are human beings.’ Is Lucky anything but unlucky?
Beckett insisted that names of characters hold no significance. Minimal information only is provided about each character. The dramatic interest is in how characters interact, interlink and counter-balance each other.
Vladimir and Estragon, the eternal couple, are mutually dependent because they epitomise inseparable complementary elements of human personality: Estragon is more perplexed with physical concerns while Vladimir has more intellectual preoccupations, so Estragon is given business with his boots, while stage directions for the more articulate Vladimir - he reflects … musingly … deep in thought … examines his hat - underline his intellectual disposition. He reflects philosophically: ‘What are we doing here, that is the question … Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? … But in all that what truth will there be?’ Such thinking is of little concern to the more emotional Estragon.
Vladimir: [Gloomily.] It's too much for one man. [Pause. Cheerfully.] On the other hand what's the good of losing heart now, that's what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties.
Estragon: Ah stop blathering and help me off with this bloody thing.
Vladimir is ever an optimist: ‘All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, saying, Vladimir, be reasonable you haven’t yet tried everything.’ Life, he muses, is ‘too much for one man … On the other hand what’s the good of losing heart now?’ That one of the two thieves crucified with Christ was saved seems to him ‘a reasonable percentage’. Unlike Estragon who finds that life just gets ‘worse’, Vladimir decides, ‘With me it’s just the opposite … I get used to the muck as I go along.’ Vladimir’s heightened recognition that there can be no escape from death is one of dignified stoicism - he will relapse into waiting, though he laments the only thing certain is that they wait for death.
Though Godot does not come, Pozzo does. His arrival offers a distraction for the tramps from their waiting. His extrovert role counter-balances Estragon and links with the timorous introvert, Lucky. His initially superior status to and later dependence on Lucky is dismissed as mere chance. This couple present further evidence of the sad condition of humanity. Indeed, Estragon recognises Pozzo, significantly, as ‘all humanity’.
Endless comic pantomime, circus clowning and old-fashioned music hall cross-talk counterpoint the characters’ utter self-absorption and horror of having nothing to do. Potentially serious comments are undermined frequently by banal or ludicrous remarks. Bathos characterises the discussion about the thieves crucified with Christ with Estragon’s response: ‘People are bloody ignorant apes.’
While he attempts suicide, Estragon’s trousers fall down. ‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,’ observes Nell in Endgame. And nothing can be unhappier than the hopeless wait for some unforeseeable improvement in the nature of human existence.
Need we be concerned with Godot? Godot doesn’t come and perhaps won’t come; only death is certain to come. There is no certainty about Godot’s identity. Estragon admits ‘Personally I wouldn’t even know him if I saw him.’ Asked about the identity of Godot, Beckett admitted, ‘If I knew I would have said so in the play.’ Godot exists only - (as a possibility) in the restrictive belief of Vladimir and Estragon and all humanity - as an alternative to suicidal despair:
Vladimir: We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow. [Pause.] Unless Godot comes.
Estragon: And if he comes?
Vladimir: We’ll be saved.
Belief in and dependence on the Godot enigma limits what Vladimir and Estragon can think and do; it traps and enslaves them every bit as much as Lucky is enslaved to Pozzo. It leaves them, as characters, forever trapped by their conviction that meaning might be made out of meaninglessness, and as players, forever trapped upon the stage, waiting for … waiting …
Vladimir: We are no longer alone, waiting for the night, waiting for Godot, waiting for … waiting.
