Confusion of the Divine

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Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is a play that stresses the inevitability of death and the despair and pessimism that death creates in life. Played in a bizarre world that seems to be the ruins of a once meaningful world, the play is centered around two homeless men, Vladimir and Estragon, and a tree. Their time and purpose is centered around waiting for a man named Godot who they have yet to see but have placed all of their hope and faith into his appearance. Ever so often, Pozzo and Lucky, a traveling man and his “slave”, come around and discuss the matter of Godot with Vladimir and Estragon, either giving them hope or bringing them despair. Still, through these discussions explicitly centered around Godot, much is said about the meaning of God and given the similarities with their acts of isolation, Godot can be taken as a representation of God.   

One of the great beauties of Beckett’s play is that the characters often go against their own personalities after literally trading hats. Lucky, after trading hats, gives a speech that ranges between an irrational jumble of sounds to a coherent statement on the existence and nature of the divine. The irrationality may point to a past traumatic event that has caused Lucky to lose his level-head but nevertheless it still had symbolism. Reduced and simplified, the speech is basically as follows: he accepts the existence of a personal God that exists outside of this world and concludes that he suffers with those who are plunged into torment. He is describing a lost hope in God by the consciousness of men that has caused a chasm between the two and has left men abandoned and unwanted, hence explaining the current disheartening scene.

At the beginning of the speech, Lucky states, “…a personal God…outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia, divine athambia, divine aphasia, loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell…” Although the speech becomes more and more incoherent, the vocabulary is not representative of a slave’s dictionary but of a man that was once familiar with the heavenly. These intelligent nuances of the speech are half of Beckett’s manner of communicating a central idea in the play to us: the nature of God and his relationship to man. The other half of Beckett’s message is the nonsensical and absurd elements of Lucky’s speech that increasingly invade the coherency at the beginning of the speech. For example, the use of qua, a Latin term meaning "in the function or capacity of", is common in scholarly addresses, but Lucky's repetition of the term as “quaquaquaqua” creates an absurd sound, as though God is being ridiculed by a quacking or squawking sound. Given the start of Lucky’s speech and its progressively confusing end, there are obviously two different styles of performance that are available to the reader. Either the nonsensical end could be accentuated or the intellectual beginning could have a larger role, all dependent on the performance.

If the actor or actress choose to dwell on the divine thirst that Lucky depicts then the speech would surely be slower and more coherent. With careful representation, Lucky’s desperation for a deity and need for meaning and validation of his own existence can be harped on without creating an absurd and confusing ending.  Such a depiction can be found in this actress’s performance.

If the actor or actress chooses to dwell on the confusion that takes front stage at the end of the speech, then the acting gets more ridiculous and bewilders the audience. The facial expressions of the actor can change the entire meaning of a speech and thus creating a vastly different mood of the text. Furthermore, creating a scene around the speech with other characters will allow for the audience to interact with their expressions. If Vladimir, Estragon, and Pozzo, are all losing their mind as Lucky is presenting his speech then the mood is vastly different than if they were simply sitting and calmly listening.  The former can be seen in this representation of Lucky’s speech.

The difference between the two performance creates a contrasting view of the scene that emphasizes the changing environment of the speech. Given the general confusion of the scene and the wait for Godot, Beckett makes it difficult to hide either the scholarly part of the speech or the rambling at the end. Thus, creating the option of interpretation to the actors and actresses. However, the two different interpretations can be compatible especially given the topic of the speech, God. Beckett’s motif to create confusion in the midst of the existential crisis certainly resonates to all audiences giving it a profound significance to many.