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Waiting for Godot is not about Godot or even about waiting. It is waiting.

The two key words in the title are waiting and Godot. What Godot exactly means has

been the subject of much controversy. It has been suggested that Godot is a weakened form of

the word God. Godot may therefore suggest the intervention of a supernatural agency. Or

perhaps Godot stands for a mythical human being whose arrival is expected to change the

situation. We may presume, too, that both these possibilities (a supernatural agency and a

supposed human being) may be implied through the use of the name Godot. Furthermore,

although Godot fails to appear in the play, he is as real a character as any of those whom we

actually see. However, the subject of the play is not Godot; the subject is waiting, the act of

waiting as an essential characteristic aspect of the human condition. Throughout their

lives, human beings always wait for something; and Godot simply represents the objective of

their waitingan event, a thing, a person, death. Beckett has thus depicted in this play a situation

which has a general human application.

At first sight this play does not appear to have any particular relationship with the humanpredicament. For instance, we feel hardly any inclination to identify ourselves with the two

tramps who are indifferent to all the concerns of civilized life. Godot sounds as if he might have

some significance; but he does not even appear on the stage. However, soon we are made to

realize that Vladimir and Estragon are waiting and that their waiting is of a particular kind.

Although they may say that they are waiting for Godot, they cannot say who or what Godot is,

nor can they be sure that they are waiting at the right place or on the right day, or what would

happen when Godot comes, or what would happen if they stopped waiting. They have no

watches, no time-tables, and there is no one from whom they can get much information. They

cannot get the essential knowledge, and they are ignorant.

They tell stories, sing songs, play verbal games, pretend to be Pozzo and Lucky, do

physical exercises. But all these activities are mere stop-gaps serving only to pass the time. They

understand this perfectly. Come on, Gogo, pleads Didi, return the ball, cant you, once in a

way? and Estragon does. As Estragon says later,

We dont manage too badly, eh Didi, between, the two of us.......We always find

something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist

Here we have the very essence of boredomactions repeated long after the reason for

them has been forgotten, and talk purposeless in itself but valuable as a way to kill time. We

could appropriately say that the play is not about Godot or even about waiting; the play puts

waiting on the stage. The play is waiting, ignorance, impotence, boredom, all these having

been made visible on the stage before us. As a critic says, Beckett in his dramas does not write

about things but presents the things themselves. In other words, a play by Beckett is a direct

expression or presentation of the thing itself as distinct from any description of it or statement

about it. In the waiting of the two tramps we, the audience, recognize our own experience. We

may never have waited by a tree on a deserted country road for a distant acquaintance to keep

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7/26/2019 Waiting for Godot is Not About Godot or Even About Waiting

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his appointment, but we have certainly experienced other situations in which we have waited and

waited.

When Pozzo and Lucky first appear, neither Vladimir nor Estragon seems to recognize

them; Estragon even takes Pozzo for Godot. But after they have gone,Vladimir comments thatthey have changed since their last appearance. Estragon insists that he did not know them

while Vladimir insists: We know them, I tell you. You forget everything. In Act II, when

Pozzo and Lucky re-appear, cruelly deformed by the action of time, the tramps again have their

doubts whether these are the same people whom they met on the previous day. Nor does Pozzo

remember them. To wait means to experience the action of time, which is constant change. And

yet, as nothing real ever happens, that change is in itself an illusion. The tears of the world are a

constant quantity, says Pozzo, For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another

stops.

The tramps are waiting for nothing in particular. They even have to remind each other of

the very fact that they are waiting and of what they are waiting for. Thus, actually they are not

waiting for anything. But, exposed as they are to the daily continuation of their existence, they

cannot help concluding that they must be waiting.