An essay I wrote on Waiting for Godot. It is truly a wonderful play. I hope this may shed some light on Beckett's philosophical voice in writing this absurd "tragicomedy".
To understand Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is to plunge deep into a philosopher’s abyss. We are forced to directly confront an existentialist world wholly indifferent to our presence. Waiting for Godot is a play laden with weighty philosophical moments to this conclusion. Using the tramps as his vehicle, Beckett brazens out the mortality of man, which falls perpetually deeper into maddening silence. Beckett’s vision is corroborated by one over-arching truth, which is the first premise for his conception of life: the totality of the world is based on chance and therefore all occurrences are arbitrary. Hence, for Beckett, any meaning we find is subjective – a merely futile attempt to distract us from our miserable predicament. God, if he exists, only furthers our torment through his constant silence. Nevertheless, we persistently wait for a more optimistic truth, but as Godot never comes, neither will our salvation.
To fully construct Beckett’s nihilistic philosophy, we may turn to nearly any moment in the play. In Act I, Vladimir vehemently explains that all things, namely the Gospels, are based on a “reasonable percentage,” a clear allusion to Pascal’s project of idealizing a universe based on chance. In Act II, the tramps fall prey to a classic case of existential paralysis , as they plunge to the ground with Pozzo, all of them rendered involuntarily immobile. In Act I, Lucky’s monologue reduces all of our attempts to find solace in an apathetic world into a single sentence: we waste our time longing for salvation under a heaven indifferent to us, as the looming certainty of death constantly approaches. For this analysis, however, I have chosen the Vladimir’s speech in Act II which is a direct response to Pozzo’s earlier speech about time being the gatekeeper of man’s metaphysical prison. In archetypal postmodernist fashion, Vladimir becomes directly aware of his reality as a character in a cruel world. I believe that in this poetic meta-theatrical moment, Beckett’s philosophical voice comes through the strongest.
<--- Begin Passage for Analysis --->
VLADIMIR:
Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be?
(Estragon, having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing off again. Vladimir looks at him.)
He'll know nothing. He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll give him a carrot.
(Pause.)
Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries.
(He listens.)
But habit is a great deadener.
(He looks again at Estragon.)
At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.
(Pause.)
I can't go on!
(Pause.)
What have I said?
He goes feverishly to and fro, halts finally at extreme left, broods. Enter Boy right. He halts. Silence.
<--- End Passage --->
In the beginning of Vladimir’s speech he entertains a type of Cartesian doubt: “Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now?” In doubting the very fundamental constructs of one’s reality – Descartes contends in the cogito – we are able to prove the existence of the self . But Beckett takes this conclusion and turns it on its head; instead of using doubt to prove the self, Vladimir uses it to negate the self, realizing that even if he exists, his existence must certainly be arbitrary. If his situation is, therefore, the random manifestation of chance, then he is irrevocably doomed to repeat the same essential cycle of thoughts and actions indefinitely: “But in all that what truth will there be?” Of course this is a rhetorical question that Beckett asks us directly, but the implied answer is nothing. Even in the face of a well-established Cartesian certainty, Beckett, through Vladimir, turns his back on the self.
In his speech, Vladimir also goes through a series of circular realizations, which are an instrumental premise in Beckett’s vision of the world. After a moment of reflection, Vladimir actually realizes that he is a character in a vicious existence that he cannot escape. I believe that this predicament is directly analogous to Beckett’s convictions about his own life; he too is a character, as we all are, in a never-ending, bleak story that we call ‘living’. Vladimir declares: “Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably.” For Beckett, life is a constant circularity of fortuitous, arbitrary events that only seem important to us because we think they are. These events, Beckett further contends, are distractions that keep us alive, but also keep us miserable. Habits, thus, are not positive notions; in fact, “habit is a great deadener.” The only way to escape the abject cycle is to cease living all together. Perhaps this is why Estragon and Vladimir constantly contemplate suicide, always resolving to bring a bit of rope to their next session of waiting.
Vladimir’s speech also gives the audience a glance into Beckett’s existential views on other people. If we accept my thesis, taking Vladimir to posses Beckett’s philosophical voice in this scene, Estragon, then, is surely everybody else. Estragon’s character is a ubiquitous archetype, which is juxtaposed as the perfect foil to Vladimir – a character driven by more elevated sensibilities. Gogo struggles constantly with his boot, a symbol of the mundane and earthly efforts of man. He also falls asleep at perhaps the most philosophically important part of his partner’s dialogue, “Estragon, having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing off again.” But Vladimir does not blame Estragon for his shortsightedness, faulty memory, or childish impatience; perhaps then Beckett does not overtly scorn humanity for its constant focus on meaningless details and emotions. And yet, Vladimir does recognize his partner’s shortcomings, declaring: “[tomorrow] … He'll know nothing. He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll give him a carrot.” If we push this statement further, conscious of Beckett’s first philosophical premise, we can find two of Beckett’s major philosophical views packed deeply in these statements; one is ontological , the other is moral .
Firstly, these statements are the key to Vladimir’s reasoning that he is in a hopeless world that is constantly re-iterating the same events. If the events seem to repeat themselves, and Vladimir is the only one who can recognize it, he is doomed to a lonely consciousness. The great ‘lie’, then, is the belief that the universe is somehow structured or intentional, an ontological thesis sometimes known as nihilism. In another sense, these two sentences characterize Estragon, a symbol for the unenlightened, simple man, as an archetype of man’s complacence. We live constantly unsatisfied but we don’t know why; this is Estragon’s tragedy as he is fated to forget all he has learned. The two tramps live the same day over and over again. But Estragon “know[s] nothing” and therefore each day he is blissfully ignorant of the last. This moral thesis might be called utilitarianism.
Traditional readings of Waiting for Godot peg Vladimir as the optimist and Estragon as the pessimist, but the abovementioned statement (“He’ll know … carrot”) makes me disagree with the critics. Estragon’s ignorance lends him a type of naïvety that Vladimir, whose memory remains somewhat consistent, cannot possibly entertain. Therefore, it appears to me that Vladimir is the pessimist, realizing the true nature of his nihilistic situation, as “the air is full of our cries.” Estragon’s blissful ignorance and simple mind protect him from his Dasein , though it does preserve his confusing reality. Perhaps here Beckett is suggesting that the habits we posses to distract ourselves from the overwhelmingly difficult certainty of our eventual death in some way instantiate the constructs of the system that enslaves us. In other words, in waiting for Godot, we merely wait for our death. If we were able to not wait, perhaps we would never die. But the play re-enforces this notion over and over again, almost as if it were an axiom of their reality: the tramps can’t leave, they must wait, and so ‘they do not move’.
The strongest philosophical sentiments in Vladimir’s speech are expressed, appropriately, near its end. Once he has deconstructed his own world, he seems to realize that he is a character in a story. In a wonderfully cogent postmodernist move, Beckett makes the character aware of his own reality, which again analogously communicates Beckett’s awareness of his own reality. It is almost as if Beckett himself is onstage muttering the words when Vladimir says: “(He looks again at Estragon.) At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. (Pause.) I can't go on!” And indeed Vladimir is correct, for the audience is one such onlooker who judges Vladimir and Estragon as absurd, ridiculous characters. But the suggestion of this line goes far deeper, especially if we attribute it to Beckett himself.
“At me too someone is looking,” is perhaps a direct reference to Sartre’s gaze of the other , a first-wave existentialist theory which essentially contends that complicated ideas and problems of ‘self’ are conjured in an individual when he realizes that he is being looked at by another. This, in turn, fundamental alters the way that one views himself. Sartre thinks that when we look at others, we try to objectify them, removing them as subjects of their own experience and making them objects of our own experience. Yet when the other gazes at us, and we become aware of this (as Vladimir certainly has here), Sartre says we that acknowledge the negation of ourselves as a subject, whereby a certain type of leveling occurs within the self. To fully apprehend this, Sartre claims, is to intimately recognize a deep void – represented by nothingness – implicit in one’s self. Though we needn’t get so technical to understand the meaning of Vladimir’s line, the gaze that an indifferent God (or audience) imposes upon him, forces one either into a type of ignorant but unsatisfying sleep – which Estragon demonstrates perfectly – or an apprehension of man’s futility. The latter path is exactly what Vladimir is approaching when he desperate declares: “I can’t go on!” And if we take this to be an accurate reading of the text, the “pauses” in the stage directions allow Vladimir ample time to reason through this process. The result horrifies him so, that he pauses again, reflects, and declares: “What have I said?” It is, again, as if Beckett himself is unable to cope with the conclusion that he has drawn from the structural implications of the other’s dominating gaze.
At the end of this excerpt, Vladimir “goes feverishly to and fro” as if he is wavering between the choice to forget what he has discovered and sleep (like Estragon), or to apprehend the truth, and simply tarry until the end. It seems, when “he halts finally at extreme left, broods” that he has made his decision, but it is unclear that this is so. The boy’s arrival interrupts this process, and the silence that comes after is perhaps a cue that the whole cycle – of Vladimir’s rejection of the self, criticisms of humanity, and his eventual apprehension of nothingness – is bound to repeat once more. This time, however, it is in the context of conversation with the boy: the boy resumes Estragon’s role while Beckett continues to speak through Vladimir. Therefore the “silence” that ends the excerpt is perhaps louder than Vladimir’s speech altogether. It is in that silence which we are forced to reflect upon the truth which is so hard to confront. And this truth, of an arbitrary existence, is so hopeless that it forces us to constantly forget it, delaying the last moment as many times as possible, until we waste away into nothingness.
Wittgenstein famously declared, at the end of his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, “Of that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent .” For Beckett, man’s confrontation of his mortality and finitude forces him to suffer in anguish for his entire life. Vladimir, repeating Pozzo, explains this explicitly: “[we exist] astride of a grave and a difficult birth.” The tragedy is that we are doomed to reflect about it in silence. Yet Waiting for Godot is Beckett’s attempt to disprove Wittgenstein; this absurdist tragicomedy is Beckett’s best attempt at capturing the miserable implications of a world that is indifferent to a creature which clings so insistently to it. Vladimir’s speech, therefore, is simultaneously an acknowledgment of a metaphysical truth about the world, the rejection of hope in man, and intimate commentary on man’s relationship with himself and others. To some, Beckett’s voice here is absurd, but, for me, it couldn’t be any clearer.
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