“Waiting for
Godot encapsulates modern man’s predicament.” Do you agree?
1. INTRODUCTION
Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s
play Waiting for Godot is primarily a play about human suffering
involved in human existence. In
this outstanding play of absurdity, two tamps Estragon and Vladimir are trapped
in their commitment of waiting
for a certain Mr. Godot, a person they believe will alleviate their boredom and
save them from the chaos of life
and restore the order of their social status. As Beckett often focused on the
idea
of “the suffering of being”, he
portrays human condition as a period of suffering which is an inevitable part
of
human existence. Human condition
is characteristic of suffering from such misfortunes as meaningless waiting,
disillusionment of hope, abnormal
relationship between themselves and with others, the meaninglessness and
helplessness of their lives,
their tragic fate before God, and their fear of death. It seems that Beckett
tries to
reveal all the evils, sins,
unfairness, and disasters that exist and are happening all the time in this
world and
that human beings would not be
able to avoid encountering them during their life time, from the
beginning to the end.
2. PHYSICAL AND MENTAL PAIN
As the audience can see,
everybody in the play is suffering from some kind of pain that life has brought
them, both physically and
mentally. At the very beginning of the play, one of the tramps, Estragon, is
trying hard to take off his boot,
which is pinching him and is obviously causing great pain to him, as he is
panting and exhausted with such
an effort. Though it seems that the boot act is nothing so important as
compared with their endless
waiting act, it is as a matter of fact a skillful way of Beckett’s play to
present to the
audience right from the beginning
with such implication that human beings are born to suffer from all kinds of
miseries, and this suffering is
accompanying us through every stage of our life until the day we die. As to
Vladimir, another tramps, he
enters “advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart”(Beckett, 1965, p.
1),
obviously unable to walk normally
as he must also be suffering from some kind of pain that is unknown to the
audience. As Birkett suggests,
“Estangon’s sore feet and Valdimir’s bladder problems between them shape this
opening visual image of action
and movement which is difficult and painful and yet, with unwitting heroism,
persevered with. Between them,
they present the double nature of the human condition as Beckett sees it. In
Estangon, it is the urge to get
rid of the constraints and pinches of culture and to move back to silence; in
Vladimir, the urge to continue
within and despite the constraints, perpetually producing speech.” (Birkett,
1987, p. 16) Frustrated by the
difficulty of pulling off his boot, Estangon has to give up on his boot,
remarking
“Nothing to be done”, which is a
revelation of human beings’ helplessness in face of the sufferings imposed
on them by the unfavourable human
condition, with which Vladimir almost agrees, though in the past he has
always “resumed the struggle”.
But in the end, he also agrees that “Nothing to be done.” It suggests the
hopelessness of human beings in
face of difficulty and pain and the blindness of Beckett’s tramps to their real
condition.
