The Timelessness of "Waiting for Godot": Analyzing Perspectives

Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” is a play that seems to alienate its audience. Set in some kind of strange post-apocalyptic world, the piece employs two elderly homeless men as its protagonists who further propel the theme of isolation; they stay stuck in a cycle of stagnation, waiting for a presumably authoritative figure called Godot whom they’ve been expecting for what seems like forever. The universe that Beckett creates in “Waiting for Godot” is a bizarre, incomprehensible landscape that almost seems to be a parody of our own. But this comparison is a faulty one. The word “parody” insinuates a satiric or ironic imitation of reality, and contrary to that definition, the play’s foundation rests on a climate easily recognized by an audience living in post-World War II Europe. At the time of its first premiere in Paris in 1953, France, like much of the continent, was struggling to regain its strength and prestige in the aftermath of war. Thus, the alienation in “Waiting for Godot” actually becomes a familiar phenomenon in front of this audience, and communicates the sentiment of the time period—a crumbled infrastructure, a collapsed government, lingering chaos and poverty.

For these viewers, the absurdism in the play reflects the sociopolitical environment of the postwar era, or their reality. The protagonists, Vladimir and Estragon, though airheaded and sometimes even nonsensical, convey more dark, morbid subjects than they do funny ones. The cyclic nature of the plot penetrates the dialogue so much that ideas of hopelessness and suicide become routine, colliding with lighter moments of ridiculous conversation held by the characters.

Pozzo, a central purveyor of the play’s comedy, represents a ruling elite that has taken advantage of the chaos so much that it has made slaves out of educated, presumably middle class human beings like Lucky. Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo’s lower class foils, embody the desperation of a population deeply affected by a broken system, and attempt to seek help from an authority they believe has all the answers: Godot. Godot, symbolic of the government, consistently fails Vladimir and Estragon despite their compliance, but they are unable to see that he will never come to save them, and so the cycle continues.

The filmed performance of “Waiting for Godot”, released in 2001 as part of a Beckett on Film project and screened at the Barbican Centre in London, illustrates the postwar theme most blatantly. For example, the description of the setting in Beckett’s script consists of “a country road. A tree. Evening.” (Beckett 1). In the film adaptation, the setting remains minimalist but amplifies the theme with an almost post-apocalyptic scenario. Vladimir and Estragon roam the bleak dirt road, surrounded by mountains of gray, colorless debris that resemble mounds and mounds of ruins. Somehow a thin, black tree rises from this wasteland, behind Vladimir and Estragon. It is in this area, a landscape reminiscent of a leftover combat zone, that the hat swapping scene takes place.

The hat swapping scene is a pivotal moment in the play because it demonstrates the concept of knowledge as a source of power and a possible escape from ignorance and helplessness. Lucky’s hat, left on the road from their last encounter, appears to be the object that provides knowledge, and so the two men cyclically begin trading their hats for Lucky’s. At first, both Vladimir and Estragon alternate between confusion and astonishment, but as the swap goes on, Estragon’s expressions veer towards amusement, while Vladimir remains dubious.

Gordon College’s 2013 production of “Waiting for Godot” captures the same emotional reactions. This is strange because the setting is so different. In Gordon College’s adaptation, the actors are, predictably, much younger than the actors from the 2001 film; their youthfulness makes the setting more significant by boosting its modernity. Vladimir and Estragon, instead of standing among ruins, are positioned in front of a chain-link fence, facing the highway—the sounds of speeding cars replace all dialogue in this scene. With such young people interpreting “Waiting for Godot” in such a contemporary setting, the play’s motives are changed: instead of reflecting a postwar society, it reflects a post-recession context that is more familiar to its twenty-something-year old American audience than World War II’s aftermath.

From Gordon College’s production, it is clear that ultimately the audience decides the context of a performance. However, the argument has not changed. Vladimir and Estragon, though transported to the twenty-first century United States, are still searching for a way out of the chaos, still waiting for the higher authority that will grant them salvation, in the same way that Americans in 2008 were hoping that a new administration would rectify all the country’s economic problems. And like the Americans of 2008, Europeans in 1953 searched in vain for stability they felt should have been provided to them by the government. Thus, instead of alienating, “Waiting for Godot” transcends time and sheds light on an important aspect of the human condition: reality’s cycle of hoping and waiting.

Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. “Waiting for Godot”. New York: Grove Press, 1954. Print.