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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• Act II

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