Many of the critical responses to Beckett’s works note the importance of philosophical ideas to their construction. In answer to the question, what is it about? There are any number of answers it is about nothing, it is about waiting, it is about a life of meaningless repetition until death, it is about the moments of joy and comedy that break up a life of otherwise meaningless repetition until death, it is an exploration of Beckett’s view of religion, it is about the art of theatre itself… Stewart and McKellen: A Vaudevillian double act. The tragedy and the comedy are inextricable, each adding to the other.

It earns this classification through the intermixing of the tragedy of the characters’ existential crises with the vaudevillian elements of physical humour and the form of the ‘double act’. It is classed as a tragicomedy in two acts. Vladimir: I’m beginning to come round to that opinion It is a play in which famously “nothing happens, twice”: The two acts of the play follow exactly the same structure, though the second act is slightly shorter. A messenger then arrives to let them know that Godot won’t be coming. The interaction between the four characters provides a brief distraction for Vladimir and Estragon before Pozzo and Lucky continue on their way. While they wait, they pass the time with a series of repetitive, habitualised activities. Waiting for Godot is centred two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, waiting on a country road for the elusive Godot. Postmodernism is both a reaction against modernist values and a natural progression from them the quest for an overarching sense of meaning is largely abandoned, and the experimentation with new modes of expression is replaced by a reconfiguring of older modes (Thomas Pynchon, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Ali Smith).įocussing on the philosophy behind Waiting for Godot and its representations of time, place, and language, it is possible to get deeper into some of the elements of modernism and postmodernism within the play and to place it more firmly within the transition (for anyone interested in other “transitional” works, Jorge Louis Borges Labyrinths and Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose are other good places to start). Without going into too much detail, modernism can be described as an early twentieth-century movement defined by formal innovation and the quest for meaning and self-realisation in an increasingly fragmented world (T.S.Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, anyone that ever wrote a literary manifesto). It was written in 1955 when modernism was experiencing something of a revival in the wake of the Second World War, however, there is some distance between this play and earlier modernist works. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is often used as an example of a work astride two movements: modernism and postmodernism.

Waiting for godot published