Mobile Menu
- Find a Tutor
- Connection User
- Edit Profile
- Forgot Password
- Novelguides by Title
- Reports & Essay by Title
- Quotes by Author
- Novelguides by Author
- Ask a Question
- Novelguides
- Connections
- Reports & Essays
- Ask Question
- Tutor's Market Place
- How it Works
What are You Studying?
Novelguide rooms, novelguide: search by author, novelguide: search by title, book navigation.
- Waiting for Godot: Act 1
- Waiting for Godot: Act 2
- Waiting for Godot: Characters
- Waiting for Godot: Metaphors
- Waiting for Godot: Themes
- Waiting for Godot: Top Ten Quotes
- Waiting for Godot: Biography
Waiting for Godot: Essays and Questions
1. Discuss the idea of pairing throughout Waiting for Godot .
Throughout Waiting for Godot Beckett utilizes pairing or doubling to emphasize his theme of human dependency. With the exception of Godot, all the characters in the play are paired. Indeed, the main characters Vladimir and Estragon, who are at times difficult to tell apart because of their identical dialog, seem like twins. For instance, in the opening line of the play Estragon announces “nothing to be done,” and a short while later, Vladimir recites the exact same line (1). Although we know at times they do part, they are never seen apart by the reader or audience for more than an instant. Vladimir and Estragon are two men entirely dependent upon each other. Although they argue nonstop, and threaten over and again to part from each other, they nevertheless depend upon each other entirely for shelter, food, company and, most of all, for the reassurance that, indeed, Godot will appear and save them.
In addition, Pozzo and Lucky are so closely paired that they are connected with a rope. Pozzo suggests how Estragon should control Lucky: “well to begin with he should pull on the rope, as hard as he likes so long as he doesn't strangle him. He usually responds to that. If not he should give him a taste of his boot, in the face and the privates as far as possible (57).” Despite Pozzo’s cruelty, Lucky has become so dependent upon Pozzo that he is willing to subjugate himself as a slave, indeed an animal, over fear of the idea of parting from Pozzo. In addition the pair of boys who come at the end of each act to announce that Godot will yet again fail to show up are interchangeable brothers whom Vladimir cannot distinguish between.
2. In Act II, Vladimir sings a song about a dog who “stole a crust of bread” (34). Discuss how Beckett utilizes this song to emphasize his idea of repetitiveness in Waiting for Godot .
Vladimir's song at the beginning of Act II underlines the repetitiveness of life. In the song, a dog comes into the kitchen and steals a crust of bed. The cook beats him with a ladle until he is dead. Subsequently other dogs bury their canine friend, with an epitaph warning “for the eyes of dogs to come,” after which the ditty begins immediately again in circular fashion. The song can be repeated without change forever.
Although it could be argued that the dog in Vladimir’s dog song is analogous to Lucky, who after all “might run amuck any minute,” who eats bones and whom Vladimir and Estragon contemplate giving “a good beating,” Beckett would have us believe that this song is representative, first, of the repetitive nature of the play and, second, of Vladimir and Estragon's circular lives (51).
Like the dogs in the song, the individual events in the men’s lives follow each other endlessly while they wait for Godot who never comes. They are caught in a never ending cycle unable to do anything else or go anywhere else because of this incessant waiting for a man who never appears. The sun will go down, the moon will rise and they will continue, unable to break out of their circular lives.
3. Discuss the idea of the meaningless of time in Waiting for Godot.
In Waiting for Godot , time is elusive and difficult to pin down. Both Act I and Act II, which have the same beginning and the same ending, occur in the same place at the same time of day. At the end of each act a boy arrives to inform the men that Godot will not arrive but will surely come tomorrow. In this repetitive pattern, everything has happened many times and chances are the pattern will repeat itself, perhaps endlessly, unless Godot ever does in fact arrive and save them. For Vladimir and Estragon, this repetition demonstrates the meaningless of time. Just like the day before, each day has the same purpose—to wait for an unknown someone who never comes. The men cannot tell one day from another: “I don't remember having met anyone yesterday. But tomorrow I won't remember having met anyone today. So don't count on me to enlighten you” (58). When Vladimir questions Estragon, “so, what did we do last night,” Estragon replies “yesterday evening we spent blathering about nothing in particular. That's been going on now for half a century” (41).
Thus, because of this remarkable lack of change, time has no meaning, and if yesterday was meaningless, and the days before yesterday were also meaningless, then time itself must indeed be meaningless. The meaningless of time, Beckett would argue, can be applied to the plight of all of humankind.
4. Beckett denied a religious interpretation of Waiting for Godot and stated instead that the play’s many ambiguities hold the meaning. Discuss the possible religious significance of the play.
Some scholars maintain that the title character Godot stands for God—indeed, the name Godot sounds and looks like God—and that Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for a Messiah to come and grant them salvation. It has also been suggested that Vladimir and Estragon represent hope in a chaotic world in their unwavering faith in Godot, a savior who never comes. Early on Vladimir and Estragon appeal to Godot in "a kind of prayer . . . a vague supplication," which they maintain the invisible Godot is still considering (7). So, despite Beckett’s denial, readers and audience members cannot but help posit Godot as representing, or at least paralleling, God and/or Christ.
In addition, biblical references abound. In Act II, Pozzo is compared to Adam and Eve’s sons Cain and Abel, thus suggesting that the characters are representative of the human race. Vladimir states that "hope deferred make something sick," a reference to the biblical Proverbs 13:12: "hope deferred maketh the heart sick” (2). When Estragon desires to go barefoot Vladimir tells him not to compare himself to Christ, but Estragon tells him that "all my life I've compared myself to him." Beckett also mentions the irregularities in the story of the two thieves who were crucified next to Jesus. So, despite the author’s denial of a religious interpretation of the play, the numerous references to religion remain significant even if they are simply used by the author to illustrate the folly of religious faith and to help him argue his idea of textual uncertainty.
5. In Waiting for Godot , what would Samuel Beckett determine is the meaning of human life?
In Waiting for Godot , Beckett argues that questions regarding the purpose of human life are unanswerable. And, since there is no apparent meaning to life, as humans we are left miserable in an indifferent universe. This dark but absurd existentialist stance forces us then to impose meaning and purpose on our actions and events, not only to soothe our distress and overwhelming sense of helplessness, but also to provide distractions while we await death.
Life, the play insists, is determined by chance. Pozzo responds to Vladimir: "I woke up one fine day as blind as Fortune (56)." Vladimir and Estragon discuss the parable of the two thieves who were crucified next to Jesus: “one of the thieves was saved,” he says, “it's a reasonable percentage" (2). The notion that the thief was saved by chance suggests a random universe where life is arbitrary and just a matter of unpredictable chance.
After all is said and done, there is no meaning to Vladimir and Estragon’s lives. They live without predictable patterns of time and action. The tree in Act I is “black and bare” and then in Act II it is covered with leaves. How much time has elapsed, days, seasons, years, is anyone’s guess (41). Despite Vladimir and Estragon’s prayers, pleadings, threats and supplications for Godot to come and save them, an outcome which would give meaning to all that incessant waiting, day after day, Godot fails to show. Indeed, the plot seems to be, like Beckett’s idea of life, “without form and void,” or if you will, absolutely meaningless.
- Facebook share
Top Novelguides
Quotes by topic, report & essay.
- Thomas Jefferson: the Man, the Myth, and the Morality
- JFK: His Life and Legacy
- Gerald Ford
- Harry Shippe Truman
- Herbert Hoover
- The Presidency of FDR
- J.F.K. Biography
- James Madison
Popular Novelguides
- To Kill A Mockingbird Discuss & QA
- The Great Gatsby Discuss & QA
- Lord of the Flies Discuss & QA
- Adventures of Huck Finn Discuss & QA
- The Catcher in the Rye Discuss & QA
- Animal Farm Discuss & QA
- 1984 Discuss & QA
- Fahrenheit 451 Discuss & QA
- Odysseus Discuss & QA
- Great Expectations Discuss & QA
William Shakespeare Novels
Quotes: search by author, search reports and essays.
Novelguide.com is the premier free source for literary analysis on the web. We provide an educational supplement for better understanding of classic and contemporary literature. Novelguide.com is continually in the process of adding more books to the website each week. Please check back weekly to see what we have added. Please let us know if you have any suggestions or comments or would like any additional information. Thanks for checking out our website. More Details
Our Networks
- novelguide.com
- studyhall.novelguide.com
- Homework Help
- flashcard.novelguide.com/
- video.novelguide.com
- Share Report & Essay
- Join a school
- Join a teacher group
- Test Prep Material
Useful Links
- See what's new on our blog
- All Question
- Novelguide Authors
- Search Your School
- Teacher ratings
Waiting for Godot
Samuel beckett, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.
Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.
Waiting for Godot: Introduction
Waiting for godot: plot summary, waiting for godot: detailed summary & analysis, waiting for godot: themes, waiting for godot: quotes, waiting for godot: characters, waiting for godot: symbols, waiting for godot: theme wheel, brief biography of samuel beckett.
Historical Context of Waiting for Godot
Other books related to waiting for godot.
- Full Title: Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts
- When Written: 1948-1949
- Where Written: Paris
- When Published: 1954
- Literary Period: Modernism, Postmodernism
- Genre: Drama, Tragicomedy (a mixture of tragedy and comedy), Theater of the Absurd
- Setting: The side of an unidentified road, near a tree, at an unspecified time.
- Climax: Beckett's play essentially lacks a climax. Vladimir and Estragon spend both acts waiting for the arrival of Godot, but Godot never comes.
- Antagonist: While Vladimir and Estragon speak of an anonymous "they" who threaten to beat them and from whom they must hide, there is no real antagonist in the play. Part of the characters' predicament is that there is no precise cause or origin of the suffering and alienation they feel.
Extra Credit for Waiting for Godot
En Attendant Godot. Beckett originally wrote Waiting for Godot in French (under the equivalent title, En Attendant Godot ). He said that writing in French made it easier to write in the blank, plain style for which the play is famous. Beckett later personally translated the play into English.
Waiting for Whom? While Godot is such an important part of the play, there is widespread disagreement over the correct pronunciation of his name. Some opt for stressing the first syllable ("GOD-oh"), which emphasizes the name's link to God, while others choose to stress the second ("god-OH").
Waiting for Godot
34 pages • 1 hour read
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Act Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Discussion Questions
Are Pozzo and Lucky foils for Vladimir and Estragon? How do the relationships of the character pairs reflect one another?
The tree without leaves is one of the few parts of the sparse staging that the characters explicitly mention. What symbolic meaning does the tree hold in the context of the play?
The characters frequently ruminate on religion throughout the course of the play. To what extent would you consider Waiting for Godot to be a religious play?
Don't Miss Out!
Access Study Guide Now
Related Titles
By Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Krapp's Last Tape
Featured Collections
British Literature
View Collection
Irish Literature
Nobel Laureates in Literature
Literary Theory and Criticism
Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
Analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 27, 2020 • ( 0 )
It is the peculiar richness of a play like Waiting for Godot that it opens vistas on so many different perspectives. It is open to philosophical, religious, and psychological interpretations, yet above all it is a poem on time, evanescence, and the mysteriousness of existence, the paradox of change and stability, necessity and absurdity.
—Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd
Two tramps in bowler hats, a desolate country road, a single bare tree—the iconic images of a radically new modern drama confronted the audience at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris on January 5, 1953, at the premiere of En attendant Godot ( Waiting for Godot ). Written during the winter of 1948–49, it would take Samuel Beckett four years to get it produced. It is easy to see why. As the play’s first director, Roger Blin, commented, “Imagine a play that contains no action, but characters that have nothing to say to each other.” The main characters—Vladimir and Estragon, nicknamed Didi and Gogo—are awaiting the arrival of Godot, but we never learn why, nor who he is, because he never arrives. The tramps frequently say “Let’s go,” but they never move. We never learn where the road leads nor see the tramps taking it. The play gratifies no expectations and resolves nothing. Instead it detonates the accepted operating principles of drama that we expect to find in a play: a coherent sequence of actions, motives, and conflicts leading to a resolution. It substitutes the core dramatic element of suspense—waiting—and forces the audience to experience the same anticipation and uncertainty of Vladimir and Estragon, while raising fundamental issues about the nature and purpose of existence itself, our own elemental version of waiting. If modern drama originates in the 19th century with Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov, Beckett, with Waiting for Godot, extends the implications of their innovations into a radical kind of theatrical experience and method. The theatrical and existential vision of Waiting for Godot makes it the watershed 20th-century drama—as explosive, groundbreaking, and influential a work as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is for modern poetry and James Joyce’s Ulysses is for modern fiction. From its initial baffling premiere, Waiting for Godot would be seen, it is estimated, by more than a million people in the next five years and eventually became the most frequently produced modern drama worldwide, entering the collective consciousness with a “Beckett-like landscape” and establishing the illusive Godot as a shorthand image of modern futility and angst.
Like his fellow countryman and mentor Joyce, Beckett oriented himself in exile from his native Ireland, but unlike Joyce, who managed to remain relatively safe on the fringes of a modern world spinning out of control, Beckett was very much plunged into the maelstrom. He was born in Foxrock, a respectable suburb of Dublin, to Protestant Anglo-Irish parents. His education at Portora Royal School (where Oscar Wilde had been a student) and at Trinity College, Dublin, where he received his degree in French and Italian, pointed him toward a distinguished academic career. In 1928 Beckett won an exchange lectureship at L’École normale supérieure in Paris, where he met Joyce and assisted him in his labors on Finnegans Wake . Beckett returned to Trinity as a lecturer in French but found teaching “grim.” He would state: “I could not bear the absurdity of teaching others what I did not know myself.” In 1932 he left Ireland for good, except for short visits to his family. When World War II broke out Beckett ended a visit home and returned to Paris, later stating, “I preferred France in war to Ireland in peace.” During the war Beckett joined the French resistance in Paris, and when his group was infiltrated by a double agent and betrayed to the Gestapo, he was forced to escape to unoccupied France in 1942, where he worked as a farm laborer until the war’s end.
In 1946 Beckett struggled to restart his interrupted and stalled literary career that had produced a critical study of Marcel Proust, a collection of short stories ( More Pricks Than Kicks ), a volume of poems ( Echo’s Bones ), and two novels ( Murphy and Watt ). The turning point came during a visit to his mother in Foxrock. He would later transfer the epiphany that gave him a new subject and method to the more dramatic setting of the pier in Dún Laoghaire on a stormy night in Krapp’s Last Tape : “Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indigence until that memorable night in March, at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The vision at last. . . . What I suddenly saw then was this . . . that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most.” Krapp’s revelation breaks off, but Beckett himself completed his sentence, saying “that the dark I have always struggled to keep under” was “my most precious ally.” As Beckett biographer James Knowlson summarizes, Beckett’s insight meant that he would “draw henceforward on his own inner world for his subjects; outside reality would be refracted through the filter of his own imagination; inner desires and needs would be allowed a much greater freedom of expression; rational contradictions would be allowed in; and the imagination would be allowed to create alternative worlds to those of conventional reality.” Beckett would thereby find the way to bypass the particular to deal directly with the universal. His fiction and plays would not be social or psychological but onto-logical. To mine those inner recesses, Beckett would reverse the centrifugal direction of most writers to contain and comprehend the world for the centripetal, of reduction down to essentials. Beckett, who had assisted Joyce in the endlessly proliferating Finnegans Wake, would overturn the method of his mentor. “I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, in control of one’s material,” Beckett would observe. “He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.” This realization required a means of presentation that Beckett found in minimalism and composition in French, which he found “easier to write without style.” Restricted to a voice and its consciousness, Beckett would eliminate the conventional narrative requirements of specificity of time and place and elaborate background for characters and a complex sequence of causes and effects to form his plots. In Beckett’s work the atmosphere of futility and stagnation around which Chekhov devised his plays and stories has become pervasive. The world is drained of meaning; human relationships are reduced to tensions between hope and despair in which consciousness itself is problematic. Beckett’s protagonists, who lack the possibility of significant action, are paralyzed or forced to repeat an unchanging condition. Beckett compresses his language and situations down to the level of elemental forces without the possibility of escaping from the predicament of the basic absurdity of existence.
Returning to Paris after his epiphany, Beckett began what he called “the siege in the room”: his most sustained and prolific period of writing that in five years produced the plays Eleutheria, Waiting for Godot , and Endgame ; the novel trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable; and the short stories published under the title Stories and Texts for Nothing. Beckett stated that Waiting for Godot began “as a relaxation, to get away from the awful prose I was writing at the time.” It gave dramatic form to the intense interior explorations of his fiction. The play’s setting is nonspecific but symbolically suggestive of the modern wasteland as the play’s protagonists, Vladimir and Estragon, engage in chatter derived equally from metaphysics and the music hall while they await the arrival of Godot, who never comes. What Godot represents (Beckett remarked: “If I knew, I would have said so in the play,” and “If by Godot I had meant God, I would have said God, not Godot.”) is far less important than the defining condition of fruitless and pointless waiting that the play dramatizes. Beckett explores on stage the implications of a world in which nothing happens, in which a desired revelation and meaningful resolution are endlessly deferred. At art’s core is a fundamental ordering of the world, but Beckett’s art is based on the world’s ultimate incomprehensibility. “I think anyone nowadays,” Beckett once said, “who pays the slightest attention to his own experience finds it the experience of a non-knower, a non-caner.” By powerfully staging radical uncertainty and the absurdity of futile waiting, Godot epitomizes the operating assumptions of the theater of the absurd.
The most repeated critique of Waiting for Godot is voiced in Irish critic Vivian Mercier’s succinct summary: “Nothing happens, twice.” The play, sub-titled A Tragicomedy in Two Acts, does not, in the words of Martin Esslin, “tell a story; it explores a static situation” that is encapsulated by the words of Estragon: “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.” In act 1, Didi and Gogo await the anticipated arrival of Godot, to whom they have made “a kind of prayer,” a “vague supplication” for something unspecified that Godot has agreed to consider. However, it is by no means certain whether this is the right place or day for the meeting. To pass the time they consider hanging themselves (“It’d give us an erection”), but the only available tree seems too frail to hold them, and they cannot agree who should go first. Another pair arrives: Lucky, with a rope around his neck, loaded down with a bag, picnic basket, stool, and great coat, being whipped on by the domineering Pozzo, who claims to be a landowner taking Lucky to a fair to sell him. They halt for Pozzo to eat, and he asks Gogo and Didi if they would like to be entertained by Lucky’s “thinking,” which turns out to be a long nonsensical monologue. After Pozzo and Lucky depart, a boy enters, addresses Vladimir as Mr. Albert, and delivers the message that Mr. Godot will not be coming this evening but will surely come tomorrow. After the boy exits, Vladimir and Estragon also decide to leave but make no move to do so.
Act 2 takes place apparently the next day at the same time and place, although the tree now has four or five leaves. Again Vladimir and Estragon begin their vigil, passing the time by exchanging questions, contradictions, insults, and hats, as well as pretending to be Pozzo and Lucky, until the originals arrive. However, Pozzo is now blind and bumps into Lucky, knocking them both down. After debating whether they should help them get up, Didi and Gogo also find themselves on the ground, unable to rise, with Vladimir announcing, “we’ve arrived . . . we are men.” Eventually, they regain their footing, supporting Pozzo between them. Pozzo has no recollection of their previous encounter, and when asked what he and Lucky do when they fall and there is no one to help them, Pozzo says: “We wait till we can get up. Then we go on.” When Didi asks if Lucky can “think” again for them before they leave, Pozzo reveals that Lucky is now “dumb”—“he can’t even groan.” Vladimir wonders about their transformation since yesterday, but Pozzo insists time is a meaningless concept:
Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.
Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?
Estragon: Yes, let’s go.
They do not move.
Beckett generates meaning in Waiting for Godot through image, repetition, and counterpoint. In their bowler hats and pratfalls, Vladimir and Estragon are versions of Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, tragic clowns poised between despair and hope. Act 2 repeats the sequence of action of act 1 but deepens the absurdity as well as the significance of their Waiting for Godot . Unlike Pozzo and Lucky, whose relationship parodies the master-slave dynamic and a sadomasochistic conception of existence in which death is the only outcome of birth, Vladimir and Estragon complement each other and live in hope for Godot’s arrival and the revelation and resolution it implies (“Tonight perhaps we shall sleep in his place, in the warmth, our bellies full, on the straw. It is worth waiting for that, is it not?”). The hope that Godot might come, that purpose is possible even in the face of almost certain disappointment, is their sustaining illusion and the play’s ultimate comic affirmation. As Vladimir explains, “What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are Waiting for Godot to come. . . . We have kept our appointment and that’s an end to that. We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?” To which Estragon replies: “Billions.” By the comic calculus of Waiting for Godot continuing to believe in the absence of the possibility of belief is true heroism and the closest we get to human fulfillment. Beckett’s play makes clear that the illusions that prevent us from confronting the core truth of human existence must be stripped away, whether in the storm scene of act 3 of King Lear when bare unaccommodated man is revealed or here on a “Country road. A tree. Evening.”
Waiting For Godot Ebook PDF (1 MB)
Analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Plays
Share this:
Categories: Drama Criticism , Literature
Tags: Analysis Of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , Bibliography Of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , Character Study Of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , Criticism Of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , Didi and Gogo , Essays Of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , Estragon , Godot , Literary Criticism , Modernism , Notes Of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , Plot Of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , Samuel Beckett , Simple Analysis Of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , Study Guides Of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , Summary Of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , Synopsis Of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , The Theatre of the Absurd , Theater of the Absurd , Themes Of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , Vladimir , Vladimir and Estragon , Waiting For Godot , Waiting for Godot Analysis , Waiting for Godot Criticism , Waiting for Godot Essay , Waiting for Godot Guide , Waiting for Godot Lecture , Waiting for Godot PDF , Waiting for Godot Summary , Waiting for Godot Themes
Related Articles
Leave a Reply Cancel reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Waiting for Godot Questions and Answers
The Question and Answer sections of our study guides are a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss literature.
Ask a question and get answers from your fellow students and educators.
- Browse Questions
Waiting for Godot
Discuss the significant differences between act 1 and act 2 of waiting for godot, despite the apparent repetition and the presence of the same characters in both acts., examine the interaction of two tramps,estragon and vladimir, in waiting for godot., how does beckett achieve his artistic goals in his waiting for godot by the use of minimalism and reductionism, do the men in waiting for godot have any sort of character arcs do they evolve at all, or learn anything, or change in any way from the beginning to the end of the play, beckett called waiting for godot a “tragicomedy”., what does images, “astride of a grave and a difficult birth; down in a hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps; we have the time to grow old” suggest in waiting for godot, why discuss philosophical ideas in a work of fiction instead of, say, a treatise, if waiting for godot is considered to be a play on the absurdity of exploring life for meaning, examine if there is a standpoint for this exploration., what crisis of modern humanist values becomes the major concern of waiting for godot, how does beckett exploit the metaphor of life as theatre in waiting for godot, short note on the 'asymmetrical symmetry' of the structure of waiting for godot., what do you think is the symbolic significance of the pozzo-lucky relationship, the characters in “waiting for godot” go on; in the universe of this play “go on” leads to where, discuss the view that waiting for godot is "an image of beckett's intuition that nothing really ever happens in man's existence"., q / what is the relation between hat and duality in waiting for godot explain elaborately, q / absurdism and nihilism and homeless, explain and how all of them link in waiting for godot , would you please explain the repetition in waiting for godot , q / when vladimir tells estragon not to compare himself to christ, estragon responds that "all my life i've compared myself to him." explain the religious side of waiting for godot .
English IB: Literature
Resources for IB Language A: English
- Assessment Outline
- Examiners Report – Higher level
- Examiners Report – Standard level
- Framework for Paper 1 Commentary
- How to Read a Poem
- Paper 1 Basics
- Prose Commentary Plan
- Setting in Fiction
- Blanche -Forgotten Heroine
- Character Study – Blanche quotations
- Character Study Stanley Quotations
- Character Summaries
- General quotations
- Key themes -Streetcar
- Scene Summary -Streetcar
- Streetcar Structure
- Streetcar Symbolism 1
- Streetcar Symbolism 2
- The Old South vs the North
- Violence in Streetcar
- Athol Fugard
- Ballroom Dancing Motif – Master Harold
- Key Themes -Master Harold
- Kite motif – Master Harold
- Master Harold – Critical Essay 1
- Master Harold -Critical Essay 2
- Master Harold -Critical Essay 3
- Master Harold Summary
- Port Elizabeth
- Quotations -Master Harold
- Quotations 2 – Master Harold
- Sharpeville Massacre
- Soweto Uprising
- Symbolism – Master Harold
- Paper 2 – Basic Rules
- RG – Quotes on death
- RG Questions – Act 1
- RG Questions 2
- RG Study questions
- Beckett and the War
Godot Essay questions
- Godot Interpretations
- Godot Quotations
- Lucky’s Monologue
- Who is Godot?
- Past Papers
- Works in Translation
- IOC -Example 1
- IOP – Individual Oral Presentation
- Drama – Genre
Waiting For Godot
Essay Questions. Write a 5/6 paragraph answer to one of these questions. Do not write an introduction, but please write a strong concluding paragraph which shows your personal engagement with the question.
- One of the literary techniques used by Samuel Beckett in his Waiting for Godot is the repetition of lines of dialogue. What is the significance of this technique? What is the audience to conclude from the fact that certain lines continue to reappear, virtually verbatim, throughout the play?
- In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Godot is generally considered to be a symbol of God. What evidence does the play give to support this interpretation? Be sure to use specific examples from the script, and evaluate Beckett’s view of God using these examples.
- Analyse the extent to which Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is influenced by existential philosophy. Give attention to questions of the existence of God , the nature of man, and the nature of morality. Support your analysis with details from the play.
- Compare and contrast the relationships in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot between Estragon and Vladimir on the one hand and Pozzo and Lucky on the other. What do these relationships say about alienation and mutual dependence? And about freedom and slavery? Be sure to support your arguments with specifics from the play.
- Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot contains many biblical allusions. Choose three of them and discuss their significance to the themes of the play. What is Beckett’s view of God, and Christianity in particular?
- Samuel Beckett described his Waiting for Godot as a tragicomedy. To what extent is this an accurate description? Would you say they play bears more of the character of tragedy or comedy, or an equal mixture of both? Defend your arguments with specifics from the play.
- Existentialist Albert Camus saw in the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus a metaphor for human life. Sisyphus was a man condemned by the gods to roll a huge rock up a mountain every day, only to have it roll back down to the bottom of the mountain after he had gotten it to the summit. Discuss the extent to which Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is a picture of the myth of Sisyphus . Does the futility of life portrayed in the story fit the Greek myth? In what ways? Support your analysis with details from the play.
- Discuss the concept of freedom in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Is any of the characters truly free? Be sure to deal with Pozzo and Lucky as well as Estragon and Vladimir. What does the concept of freedom portrayed in the play tell you about Beckett’s understanding of the human condition ?
- Some critics, commenting on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, have argued that Pozzo really is Godot in spite of his denials. Do you think the first appearance of this “owner of the land” parallels the harsh deity of the Old Testament while his second is more like the suffering Savior, and his appearance is like that of a “thief in the night”? Explain why you agree or disagree with this critical assessment of Pozzo’s role in the story.
- Do you consider Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot a statement of hope or hopelessness regarding human existence? Support your conclusion with specifics from the play, and be sure to show why you do not accept the alternative view.
- Discuss the problem of inaction in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The characters often speak of doing something, but never actually do it. What is the point Beckett is trying to make here? Analyze the question using specifics from the dialogue and stage directions.
- What was Samuel Beckett’s purpose for making Waiting for Godot two acts long, especially since the two acts are so similar? Does the structure of the play help to communicate Beckett’s message? How? What do you think that message is? Support your conclusions with specifics from the play.
- In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, if Vladimir and Estragon are so filled with despair over the meaninglessness of life, why are they unable to commit suicide? What is Beckett saying about the nature of human existence through the raising of this issue repeatedly in the play?
Further Questions on Godot
- Do the men in Waiting for Godot have any sort of character arcs? Do they evolve at all, or learn anything, or change in any way from the beginning to the end of the play?
- Why discuss philosophical ideas in a work of fiction instead of a treatise?
- If it’s true that nothing or less than nothing happens in Waiting for Godot, how is it that we manage to be entertained as the audience/reader?
- Do you think the play would function differently if the characters were all female instead of male?
- Do Vladimir and Estragon stand around killing time because they’re waiting for Godot, or is waiting for Godot itself just an act to fill the void, a bit like art?
- If Waiting for Godot is moralistic in nature, what is the moral? How does the play instruct us to lead our lives? Are these lessons subjective and personal for each viewer, or objective and universal?
Share this:
Secondary School English teacher with 22 years experience. Currently working at the International Community School, Zurich, Switzerland.
Blog at WordPress.com.
- Copy shortlink
- Report this content
- Manage subscriptions
Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Plays — Waiting For Godot
Essays on Waiting for Godot
The psychological aspect of waiting for godot, waiting for godot by beckett: a theatre of absurd, made-to-order essay as fast as you need it.
Each essay is customized to cater to your unique preferences
+ experts online
How Samuel Beckett Depicts Memory in Waiting for Godot
A study of the mystery behind godot, vladimir and estragon in "waiting for godot", samuel beckett’s achievement in his absurd comedy, waiting for godot, let us write you an essay from scratch.
- 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
- Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours
Bleak Tones and Visual Sadness in Waiting for Godot
Review of samuel beckett’s play, waiting for godot, the use of folly language in samuel beckett’s waiting for godot, language, consciousness and experience in ulysses and waiting for godot, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.
Expert-written essays crafted with your exact needs in mind
Motifs and Symbols in "Mother Courage and Her Children" and "Waiting for Godot"
Relating the theatre of the absurd and symbolist poetry, post-bomb era in the spy who came in from the cold, apocalypse now, and waiting for godot, the values of the theatre of absurd in waiting for godot and the bald prima donna.
January 5, 1953
Samuel Beckett
Tragicomedy, Absurdist Fiction
Estragon, Pozzo, Lucky, Vladimir, Boy
5 January 1953, by Samuel Beckett
Tragicomedy
In the play two characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), engage in a variety of discussions and encounters while awaiting the titular Godot, who never arrives.
Throughout Waiting for Godot, the audience may encounter religious, philosophical, classical, psychoanalytical and biographical – especially wartime – references. There are ritualistic aspects and elements taken directly from vaudeville, and there is a danger in making more of these than what they are: that is, merely structural conveniences, avatars into which the writer places his fictional characters.
The main themes in Waiting for Godot include the human condition, absurdism and nihilism, and friendship.
Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky, The Boy, Godot
“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.” “Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.” “Estragon: People are bloody ignorant apes.”
Relevant topics
- Macbeth Ambition
- Romeo and Juliet
- A Streetcar Named Desire
- Twelfth Night
- Death of a Salesman
- A View From The Bridge
By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email
No need to pay just yet!
We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .
- Instructions Followed To The Letter
- Deadlines Met At Every Stage
- Unique And Plagiarism Free
IMAGES
VIDEO
COMMENTS
Waiting for Godot Questions and Answers - Discover the eNotes.com community of teachers, mentors and students just like you that can answer any question you might have on Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot. Waiting for Godot: Essays and Questions. 1. Discuss the idea of pairing throughout Waiting for Godot. Throughout Waiting for Godot Beckett utilizes pairing or doubling to emphasize his theme of human dependency. With the exception of Godot, all the characters in the play are paired. Indeed, the main characters Vladimir and ...
Full Title: Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts. When Written: 1948-1949. Where Written: Paris. When Published: 1954. Literary Period: Modernism, Postmodernism. Genre: Drama, Tragicomedy (a mixture of tragedy and comedy), Theater of the Absurd. Setting: The side of an unidentified road, near a tree, at an unspecified time.
Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Study Guide of "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Waiting for Godot is part of the Theater of the Absurd. This implies that it is meant to be irrational. Absurd theater does away with the concepts of drama, chronological plot, logical language, themes, and recognizable settings. There is also a split between the intellect and the body within the work. Thus Vladimir represents the intellect and ...
Waiting for Godot: summary. The 'plot' of Waiting for Godot is easy enough to summarise. The setting is a country road, near a leafless tree, where two men, Vladimir and Estragon, are waiting for the arrival of a man named Godot. In order to pass the time while they wait for Godot to arrive, the two men talk about a variety of subjects ...
Curtain. Beckett generates meaning in Waiting for Godot through image, repetition, and counterpoint. In their bowler hats and pratfalls, Vladimir and Estragon are versions of Charlie Chaplin's tramp, tragic clowns poised between despair and hope. Act 2 repeats the sequence of action of act 1 but deepens the absurdity as well as the ...
Examine the interaction of two tramps,estragon and vladimir, in waiting for godot. Answers: 1. Asked by sonile k #372838. Last updated by Dipak E #1246025 2 years ago 7/6/2022 9:50 PM. Waiting for Godot.
Waiting for Godot is both bleak and absurdly humorous. From the moment the curtain rises, the barrenness of the set conveys loneliness and isolation, and the rundown characters exude a subtle desperation. They seem to have hope, persevering in waiting for some sort of meaning or salvation, but it is ultimately revealed to be foolish and futile.
Godot Essay questions. Waiting For Godot. Essay Questions. Write a 5/6 paragraph answer to one of these questions. Do not write an introduction, but please write a strong concluding paragraph which shows your personal engagement with the question. One of the literary techniques used by Samuel Beckett in his Waiting for Godot is the repetition ...
Samuel Beckett's Achievement in His Absurd Comedy, Waiting for Godot. 3 pages / 1694 words. In Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, the playwright bestows upon his work the veneer of comedy, but invests the heart of it with the "absurd", the tragic. He employs the gags and the routines, the circus comedy and the songs of the "lowbrow ...
Video (Play)- Waiting for Godot. Essay- Typed. Assignment: Critical Analysis Essay. ... discussion led by questions from the individual student. The podcast should be recorded using YouTube and answer at least 3-4 student-led questions. Videos should be 20 to 30 minutes long. Individually, students will write a 500-750-word critical analysis essay.
In a 750-word formally written APA formatted essay, provide a brief overview of "Waiting for Godot" and its significance in the context of the Theater of the Absurd and existentialist literature. Introduce the central themes and unique structure of the play. Be clear on your thesis, outlining the specific aspects of the play you will analyze.