Miscellaneous Critics on Waiting for Godot :: Waiting Godot Essays

NothingnessAccordingly, any interpretation that purports to know who paragonot is (or is non), whether he exists whether he will eer come, whether he has ever come, or even whether he may admit come without being recognized (or possibly in disguise) is, if not demonstrably wrong, at least not demonstrably right (Hutchings 27).Although works of the theater of the absurd, particularly Becketts, are often comical, their underlying premises are wholly serious the epistemological principle of doubtfulness and the inability in the modern age to find a coherent system of meaning, order, or purpose by which to understand our existence and by which to cash in ones chips (Hutchings 28).Godots characters do not despair in the face of their situation, and this perseverance remains constant throughout a body of work that, in the actors line of the citation awarding Beckett the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 had transmuted the destitution of modern man into his exaltation (qtd. in Bai r 606) (Hutchings 30).Many relate the play to existentialismGod is dead, life is absurd, existence precedes essence, ennui is endemic to the human conditionIn many ways, such a reading is an evasion of the plays complexity, a way of putting to rest the uncertainty of ones response to it (Collins 33).The reader, like modern man, must not give into the arrogant presumption of cocksureness or the debilitating despair of skepticism, but instead must live in uncertainty, poised, by the conditions of our humanity and of the world in which we live, amongst certitude and skepticism, between presumption and despair (Collins 36).Tragicomedy 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 own pain too seriously, and to bear all lifes mysteries and uncertainties and thus to make the most of what we have rather than to hanker after illusory cer tainties and rewards (Esslin, Theater 47).Act II. The next day. But is it really the next day? Or after? Or forrader? (Esslin, Presence 109).Many details point out the absence of (meaninglessness of) traditional time, which is just one of many ways that the play resists interpretation and meaning commonwealth misunderstand it on all sides, just as everyone does his own sorrow. Explanations flow in from all quarters, each more pointless than the last (Esslin, Presence 110). any(prenominal) of the many attempts to impose meaning on the play include