Theme
What can it all mean? ‘It means what it says,’ said Beckett. What does that mean? Many scholars have attempted to interpret ‘Waiting for Godot’. Significantly, Beckett never did.
‘Cruel fate’ consigned Vladimir and Estragon to be part of the ‘foul brood’ that is ‘all mankind.’ Being born - the first involuntary and inexorable step towards death - is something worth repenting, decides Estragon. They are classless archetypes, pessimistically symbolising humanity desperately distracting itself from the horror that living serves no apparent purpose, other than to progress into death. One moment Estragon may cry ‘God have pity on me!’ but the next Vladimir declares, ‘In an instant all will vanish and we’ll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness!’ Life depends simply on chance. ‘That’s how it is on this bitch of an earth,’ Pozzo concludes. There’s ‘nothing to be done’.
Vladimir has tried to avoid recognising that life is futile:
Estragon: [Giving up again.] Nothing to be done.
Vladimir: [Advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart.] I'm beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I've tried to put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle. [He broods, musing on the struggle.]
… 00.53.00
‘The light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more,’ observes Pozzo. Lucky sees human existence as just wasting and pining. For Pozzo, ‘The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops.’ The world simply never changes.
Estragon endures his suffering by envying the suffering of Christ, whose life was comparatively comfortable and for whom death came more quickly:
Vladimir: Christ! What’s Christ got to do with it? You're not going to compare yourself to Christ!
Estragon: All my life I've compared myself to him.
Vladimir: But where he lived it was warm, it was dry!
Estragon: Yes. And they crucified quick.
[Silence.]
All that can give them any purpose in life is to pass the time - ‘blathering about nothing in particular’ - while waiting, passively hoping that something external [Godot] - real or otherwise - will appear to ‘save’ them.
Vladimir: Well? what do we do?
Estragon: Don't let's do anything. It's safer.
Vladimir: Let's wait and see what he says.
Estragon: Who?
Vladimir: Godot.
Estragon: Good idea.
Vladimir: Let's wait till we know exactly how we stand.
It’s safer to do nothing. It’s all the baffled pair can do, even at the ‘close’ of the play. Any hopes that humanity harbours of something improving its present painful condition are unrealistic and futile; for such we wait in vain, as do Vladimir and Estragon. The drama is a metaphor of hopelessly repetitive living that simply processes our decaying ‘birth astride of a grave’.
What appears in ‘Waiting for Godot’ to be a shapeless, repetitious performance, time dragging out interminably, characters having nowhere to go or anything in particular to do, in effect, artfully places audiences precisely within the experience of the characters!
