Waiting for Godot

Summary

Waiting for Godot is a play in two acts by Samuel Beckett, written in French as En attendant Godot between late 1948 and early 1949, published by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1952, and first staged at the small Théâtre de Babylone in Paris on 5 January 1953, directed by Roger Blin. Beckett's own English translation, subtitled a tragicomedy in two acts, was published by Grove Press in New York in 1954. The setting is a country road with a single bare tree, in the evening. Two shabby, ageing companions, Vladimir and Estragon, who call each other Didi and Gogo, meet beside the tree. Estragon has spent the night in a ditch and been beaten; he struggles to pull off a painful boot. Vladimir, troubled by his bladder, fiddles with his hat and muses on the Gospels, which disagree about the two thieves crucified with Christ: only one of the four evangelists says that one was saved. They are waiting for someone called Godot, though they cannot agree where or when they were to meet him, or what they asked of him. To pass the time they quarrel, make up, eat a carrot and consider hanging themselves from the tree, but they fear the branch will not hold both. Pozzo arrives, a loud, self-important landowner driving his servant Lucky by a rope tied round his neck. Lucky carries Pozzo's bags, stool and picnic basket. Pozzo eats chicken and lets Estragon gnaw the bones, talks grandly of the evening sky, and orders Lucky to dance and then to think aloud. With his hat on, Lucky delivers a long, torrential speech that begins as a learned argument about a personal God and dissolves into fragments, until the others tear off his hat. Pozzo and Lucky leave. A boy then comes with a message: Mr. Godot will not come this evening, but surely tomorrow. The moon rises, the two agree to go, and they do not move. The second act takes place the next day at the same hour. The tree has put out a few leaves. Vladimir sings a circular song about a dog; Estragon remembers almost nothing of the day before. They play at being Pozzo and Lucky and trade insults to fill the silence. Pozzo and Lucky return, but Pozzo is now blind and Lucky dumb; they fall in a heap, and the two friends debate whether to help them before doing so. Pozzo, asked when this happened, answers in anger that time does not matter and that human life is as brief as a birth on the edge of a grave. The boy returns, does not recognize Vladimir, and repeats the message. Vladimir asks about Godot's beard. The friends try to hang themselves with Estragon's belt, which breaks, and his trousers fall. Again they agree to go, and again they do not move.

Plot or Argument

• Act I: the road and the tree

  Estragon fights with his boot and Vladimir with his hat; they talk of the two thieves, of hanging themselves, and of the uncertain appointment with Godot.

• Act I: Pozzo and Lucky

  Pozzo arrives driving Lucky on a rope, eats his lunch, speaks of the twilight, and has Lucky dance and think; Lucky's monologue collapses into broken learning until his hat is pulled off.

• Act I: the boy's message

  A boy who tends Godot's goats says Godot will come tomorrow. Night falls; the two decide to leave and remain where they are.

• Act II: the next day

  The tree has leaves; Estragon has forgotten yesterday, Vladimir insists on it. They find Lucky's hat, play games and quarrel to pass the time.

• Act II: Pozzo blind, Lucky dumb

  Pozzo and Lucky return transformed and fall; the friends hesitate, argue about helping, then raise them. Pozzo rejects all questions about time with a bitter vision of the brevity of life.

• Act II: the boy again

  The boy, who claims not to have come before, brings the same message. A second attempt at hanging fails, and the play ends as the first act did, with the two agreeing to go and not moving.

Characters

• Vladimir (Didi), tramp

  The more reflective and anxious of the pair, who remembers, questions and keeps the appointment with Godot.

• Estragon (Gogo), tramp

  Forgetful, hungry companion with sore feet who often wants to leave and sleeps whenever he can.

• Pozzo, landowner

  Pompous master of Lucky who claims the land is his; blind in the second act.

• Lucky, servant

  Pozzo's burdened slave on a rope, who dances and thinks on command; dumb in the second act.

• A boy, messenger

  Goatherd who works for Godot and brings word each evening that Godot will come tomorrow.

• Godot, absent figure

  The awaited man who never appears and of whom only scraps are reported.

Lessons

• Waiting as a way of life

  Nothing the friends do brings Godot nearer, yet they keep the appointment through two evenings, and the play suggests they have done so many times before. Beckett makes the audience share the waiting, so that the question of what we wait for, and how we pass the time meanwhile, becomes the audience's own.

  • What do Vladimir and Estragon do to pass the time in Act I?
  • Why do they stay even when they say they will go?
  • Is their waiting faithful, foolish, or both?

• Friendship in a bare world

  Didi and Gogo bicker, threaten to part and cannot do without each other. Vladimir covers Estragon with his coat while he sleeps and comforts him after his nightmares. In a play with almost no consolations, their companionship is real.

  • Find moments when one friend cares for the other.
  • Why does Estragon say they would be better apart, and why do they not part?
  • What does the play suggest a friend is for?

• Master and servant

  Pozzo and Lucky are a grotesque picture of domination: the rope, the whip, the orders to dance and think. In Act II the master is blind and depends wholly on the servant, and both lie helpless until the waiting men decide to act.

  • How does Pozzo treat Lucky in Act I, and how do the friends react?
  • What has changed when Pozzo and Lucky return?
  • Why do Vladimir and Estragon debate so long before helping them?

• The two thieves

  Vladimir is haunted by the Gospel account that one of the thieves crucified with Christ was saved, and by the fact that only Luke tells it. The play keeps returning to the hope and uncertainty of salvation without settling either.

  • What troubles Vladimir about the four Gospels' accounts of the thieves?
  • How does Estragon respond?
  • Does the play treat hope as foolish, or as necessary?

Context

Beckett wrote the play in Paris in the years after the Second World War, during a burst of writing in French that also produced his trilogy of novels. The bare stage, the uncertain identities and the sense of a world after catastrophe have often been linked to postwar Europe and to Beckett's own wartime experience of hiding and waiting in Roussillon, though he resisted any single interpretation and said that if he had known who Godot was he would have said so in the play.

Composition

Beckett wrote En attendant Godot between October 1948 and January 1949. Roger Blin agreed to direct it and played Pozzo in the first production at the Théâtre de Babylone in January 1953; Les Éditions de Minuit had published the text in 1952. Beckett translated it himself; Grove Press published the English text in 1954, and the first English-language production, directed by Peter Hall, opened at the Arts Theatre in London in August 1955.

Reception

The Paris production became a succès de scandale and drew audiences for months. London critics were divided until Harold Hobson and Kenneth Tynan championed it, and the Irish critic Vivian Mercier remarked that it was a play in which nothing happens, twice. Its first American production in Miami in 1956 was billed as a comedy and failed, while a 1957 performance by the San Francisco Actor's Workshop at San Quentin prison was received with intense attention. Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd (1961) placed Beckett among the dramatists of the absurd, beside Ionesco, Genet and Adamov. Christian, existentialist, political and biographical readings of the play continue to coexist, and Beckett received the Nobel Prize in 1969.

Comparisons

• sartre-no-exit-and-three-other-plays

  Sartre's three characters trapped in a room and Beckett's pair stuck by a tree both make a stage of confinement; Sartre's dialogue argues ideas, while Beckett's empties speech of argument.

• camus-the-plague

  Camus answers the absurd with solidarity and work against suffering; Beckett's friends offer each other little more than presence, yet do finally help the fallen Pozzo.

• the-trial

  Kafka's Josef K. and Beckett's tramps are both bound by obligations to an authority they never meet and cannot understand.

• eliot-the-waste-land

  Eliot's arid landscape, broken speech and waiting for rain anticipate Beckett's road, tree and fragmented monologue.

• pensees

  Pascal's account of diversion as a flight from our condition reads like a commentary on Vladimir and Estragon's games to pass the time.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The opening exchange about Estragon's boot and how quickly it widens into a statement about life.
• Vladimir's worry over the Gospel accounts of the two thieves crucified with Christ.
• Lucky's speech in Act I and why the others react so violently to it.
• The tree: bare in Act I, with a few leaves in Act II.
• The repeated final exchange of each act and the stage direction that follows it.

Key terms and names

Godot

The man the two friends are waiting for; he never appears, and the play gives only scraps of information about him.

Theatre of the Absurd

Martin Esslin's 1961 label for postwar plays by Beckett, Ionesco and others that present the human situation as lacking evident meaning, often through circular action and broken language.

Tragicomedy

Beckett's subtitle for the English text: a play that joins the clowning of music hall and silent film with grief and despair.

Lucky's think

The long, unpunctuated speech Lucky delivers on Pozzo's command, beginning with scholarly talk of a personal God and collapsing into fragments.

Vaudeville and music hall

The popular comic theatre whose routines, hat-swapping and pratfalls Beckett borrows for his tramps.

Content note

The play contains crude language, a master who abuses his servant, and scenes in which the friends talk of hanging themselves; these are played as dark comedy.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What do Vladimir and Estragon know, and not know, about their appointment with Godot?
2. Comprehension How has Pozzo changed in Act II, and what has happened to Lucky?
3. Comprehension What message does the boy bring in each act?
4. Interpretation Why does Vladimir care so much that only one Gospel says one of the thieves was saved?
5. Interpretation Is the relationship between Pozzo and Lucky a mirror of the friendship between Vladimir and Estragon, or its opposite?
6. Interpretation What difference does it make that the tree has leaves in Act II?
7. Big Question Is it better to wait for something that may never come than to stop waiting?

Faith Connections

• Luke 23:39-43 (Scripture)

  The thief who asks Jesus to remember him and receives the promise of paradise is the passage Vladimir worries over; only Luke records it, which is exactly his point.

• Psalm 130:5-6 (Scripture)

  The psalmist waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning; the psalm's waiting is full of hope, a sharp contrast with the uncertain waiting on Beckett's road.

• Hebrews 11:1, 13 (Scripture)

  Faith as the substance of things hoped for, held by those who died not having received the promises, gives one Christian way of reading the friends' persistence.

• Augustine, Confessions XI (Church Fathers)

  Augustine's meditation on time, memory and expectation names the very faculties the play tests: Estragon's lost memory, Vladimir's anxious expectation and Pozzo's refusal to speak of when.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: If human beings wait for a meaning or a rescuer whose coming cannot be confirmed, then they must fill the time with habit, talk, play and each other; the play shows two men doing exactly that through two identical evenings, leaving the audience to decide whether the waiting is absurd or faithful.

Rhetorical device: repetition (refrain). Estragon's proposal to go and Vladimir's reply that they are waiting for Godot recur throughout both acts, and each act ends with the same agreement to leave followed by the direction that they do not move.

Debate: Resolved: that Vladimir and Estragon are right to keep waiting.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Beckett called the play a tragicomedy. Using the boot routine, the hat exchange, Lucky's speech and the failed hanging, argue whether the play is finally more comic or more tragic.

Comparison with No Exit and Three Other Plays: Compare No Exit with Waiting for Godot: how does each play use a confined setting and a small cast to explore freedom, other people and the meaning of time?

Medical Lens

The play is full of bodily decline rendered with comic detachment: Estragon's sore feet and boots, Vladimir's painful bladder, Pozzo's sudden blindness and Lucky's loss of speech, Estragon's sleep and nightmares, and his near-total failure to remember the previous day. Twice the friends consider hanging themselves from the tree, the second time with Estragon's belt; the scenes are played as farce, but suicide is a recurring possibility in the text. Readers have offered neurological and psychiatric readings of Estragon's memory loss and of Lucky's speech; these are interpretive, and Beckett gave no diagnoses.

• Act I, opening

  Estragon's struggle with his boot and Vladimir's urinary discomfort and anxiety about his hat.

  Pain Aging Senescence
• Act I and Act II, by the tree

  The friends discuss hanging themselves and, at the end of Act II, test Estragon's belt, which breaks.

  Suicide
• Act II

  Estragon cannot recall the events of the day before; Pozzo returns blind and Lucky dumb, and both collapse.

  Dementia Memory Disability Deformity

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Stage the first ten minutes of Act I twice, once as pure clowning and once as quiet sorrow, and discuss which tone the text supports.

• Essay

  Compare the two endings of Acts I and II and explain what the slight differences between them suggest about time and change in the play.

• Fiction

  Write the boy's report to Godot after his second visit, describing the two men he found by the tree.

Further Reading

• Endgame, Samuel Beckett

  Beckett's next full-length play, with a blind master and his servant in a bare room.

• The Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin

  Esslin's 1961 study that gave the movement its name and opens with Beckett.

• Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, James Knowlson

  The authorized biography, with detailed accounts of the play's composition and productions.

• Proust, Samuel Beckett

  Beckett's early essay on habit, memory and time, themes that return in the play.