Trapped in the all pervading
nothingness, the creatures of the absurd universe have lost their sense of
memory and time. Beckett’s setting for ‘Waiting for Godot’ mentions only ‘A country road, A Tree, Evening.’ Thus the play
is thrown into a great void – a vacuum which cannot be enclosed by memory and
time. Beckett’s time-purpose in the play is definitely to show the futility of
human existence.
Time is organically linked and
they constitute a continuum. But in Beckett’s contrapuntal dramaturgy memory
and time – the two co-ordinates of human experience are in tensions. Time seems
to be virtually non-existence for the space bound tramps. With only the haziest
fragments of memory and no future prospects, they seem to exist in a static
perpetual present.
All things change. Only we
can’t. Nonetheless, imprisoned as they are in a static situation, their
immediate concern, as well as a central concern of the play as a whole, is time
– that ‘double-headed’ monster of damnation and salvation as Beckett says in
his Proust.
