Miscellaneous Critics on Waiting for Godot :: Waiting Godot Essays

NothingnessAccordingly, any interpretation that purports to know who Godot is (or is not), whether he exists whether he go away ever come, whether he has ever come, or even whether he whitethorn have come without being recognized (or possibly in disguise) is, if not demonstrably wrong, at least not demonstrably right (Hutchings 27).Although whole kit and caboodle of the theater of the absurd, particularly Becketts, ar often comical, their underlying premises are wholly serious the epistemological principle of uncertainty and the inability in the new-fashi superstard age to find a coherent system of substance, order, or purpose by which to understand our beingness and by which to live (Hutchings 28).Godots characters do not despair in the face of their situation, and this perseverance be constant throughout a body of work that, in the wrangle of the citation awarding Beckett the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 had transmuted the destitution of modern man into his exaltatio n (qtd. in Bair 606) (Hutchings 30).Many relate the operate to existentialist philosophyGod is dead, life is absurd, existence precedes essence, ennui is endemic to the human go overIn many ways, such a reading is an evasion of the swordplays complexity, a way of putting to rest the uncertainty of ones response to it (Collins 33).The reader, like modern man, must not fix into the arrogant presumption of certitude or the debilitating despair of skepticism, exclusively instead must live in uncertainty, poised, by the conditions of our humanity and of the valet de chambre in which we live, between certitude and skepticism, between presumption and despair (Collins 36).seriocomedy is life enhancing because it tries to remind the audience of the real need to face existence knowing the worst, which ultimately is liberation, with courage and humility of not taking oneself or ones hold pain too seriously, and to bear both lifes mysteries and uncertainties and thus to make the most o f what we have or else than to hanker after illusory certainties and rewards (Esslin, Theater 47).Act II. The next day. merely is it really the next day? Or after? Or in front? (Esslin, Presence 109).Many details point out the absence of (meaninglessness of) traditionalistic time, which is just one of many ways that the play resists interpretation and meaningPeople misunderstand it on all sides, just as everyone does his own sorrow. Explanations flow in from all quarters, each more pointless than the in the end (Esslin, Presence 110). Some of the many attempts to impose meaning on the play include