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From an inauspicious beginning at the tiny Left Bank Theatre de Babylone in 1953, followed by bewilderment among American and British audiences, Waiting for Godot has become of the most important and enigmatic plays of the past fifty years and a cornerstone of twentieth-century drama. As Clive Barnes wrote, “Time catches up with genius … Waiting for Godot is one of the masterpieces of the century.”
The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone—or something—named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree, inhabiting a drama spun of their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as mankind’s inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett’s language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existential post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time.
- Sales Rank: #3331 in Books
- Brand: Grove Press
- Published on: 2011-05-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x 5.00" w x .25" l, .25 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 128 pages
Features
Review
“One of the true masterpieces of the century.” —Clive Barnes, The New York Times
“One of the most noble and moving plays of our generation, a threnody of hope deceived and deferred but never extinguished; a play suffused with tenderness for the whole human perplexity; with phrases that come like a sharp stab of beauty and pain.”
—The Times (London)
“Beckett is an incomparable spellbinder. He writes with rhetoric and music that . . . make a poet green with envy.” —Stephen Spender
“Reading Beckett for the first time is an experience like no other in modern literature.”
—Paul Auster
“[Godot is ] among the most studied, monographed, celebrated and sent-up works of modern art, and perhaps as influential as any from the last century. The nonstory of two tramps at loose ends in a landscape barren of all but a single tree, amusing or distracting themselves from oppressive boredom while they wait for a mysterious figure who never arrives, the play became the ur-text for theatrical innovation and existential thought in the latter half of 20th century.” —Christopher Isherwood, The New York Times
About the Author
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), one of the leading literary and dramatic figures of the twentieth century, was born in Foxrock, Ireland and attended Trinity University in Dublin. In 1928, he visited Paris for the first time and fell in with a number of avant-garde writers and artists, including James Joyce. In 1937, he settled in Paris permanently. Beckett wrote in both English and French, though his best-known works are mostly in the latter language. A prolific writer of novels, short stories, and poetry, he is remembered principally for his works for the theater, which belong to the tradition of the Theater of the Absurd and are characterized by their minimalist approach, stripping drama to its barest elements. In 1969, Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and commended for having "transformed the destitution of man into his exaltation." Beckett died in Paris in 1989.
At the age of seventy-six he said: "With diminished concentration, loss of memory, obscured intelligence... the more chance there is for saying something closest to what one really is. Even though everything seems inexpressible, there remains the need to express. A child need to make a sand castle even though it makes no sense. In old age, with only a few grains of sand, one has the greatest possibility." (from Playwrights at Work, ed. by George Plimpton, 2000)
Most helpful customer reviews
163 of 177 people found the following review helpful.
"Nothing happens, twice".
By B. Alcat
"Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!". That phrase, said by one of the main characters of "Waiting for Godot", somehow sums up the whole plot of this short tragicomedy in two acts. Strange??. You can bet on that!!!. So much that a well-known Irish critic said of it "nothing happens, twice".
The play starts with two men, Vladimir and Estragon, sitting on a lonely road. They are both waiting for Godot. They don't know why they are waiting for him, but they think that his arrival will change things for the better. The problem is that he doesn't come, although a kid does so and says Godot will eventually arrive. Pozzo and his servant Lucky, two other characters that pass by while our protagonists are waiting for Godot, add another bizarre touch to an already surreal story, in which nothing seems to happen and discussions between the characters don't make much sense.
However, maybe that is exactly the point that Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) wanted to make. He was one of the most accomplished exponents of the "Theatre of the Absurd", that wanted to highlight the lack of purpose and meaning in an universe without God. Does Godot, the person that Vladimir and Estragon endlessly wait, symbolize God?. According to an irascible Beckett, when hard-pressed to answer that question, "If I knew who Godot was, I would have said so in the play." So, we don't know. The result is a highly unusual play that poses many questions, but doesn't answer them.
Ripe with symbolism, "Waiting for Godot" is a play more or less open to different interpretations. Why more or less open?. Well, because in order to have an interpretation of your own, you have to finish the play, and that is something that not all readers can do. "Waiting for Godot" is neither too long nor too difficult, but it shows a lack of action and purpose in the characters that is likely to annoy many before they reach the final pages, leading them to abandon the book in a hurry. That is specially true if the reader is a student who thinks he is being barbarously tortured by a hateful teacher who told him to write a paper on "Waiting for Godot" :)
My advice, for what it is worth, is that you should persist in reading it. If it puts you to sleep, try reading it aloud with some friends, and discuss with them the implications of what happens with the characters. This play might not be thoroughly engaging, but it changed theatre and the possibilities opened before it forever. In a way, it provoked a blood-less revolution, and because of that it deserves at least a bit of our attention.
Belen Alcat
60 of 63 people found the following review helpful.
A classic, but best for those who dig absurdism
By Christopher Culver
Fifty years after its premiere, Samuel Beckett's play WAITING FOR GODOT has achieved classic status, yet it is a play more talked about than read or performed. Many people could tell the vague plot of two hobos waiting on a roadside for a man who never comes, a metaphor for the "waiting for God" that forms the duration of human existence, but much of the play remains unknown. Reading the play shows a different side of the play than popular imagination, though it will not be a rewarding activity for all.
The stage is simple. "A country road. A Tree". So is the casting. The repartee of hobos Vladimir and Estragon forms the bulk of the play's dialogue. Two other men, Pozzo and Lucky, twice stop by. Finally a Boy appears as a messenger from the mysterious Godot. Pozzo and Lucky are left out of most popular references to the play, but they form a vital part of its action. When we first meet Pozzo, he is a rich man, smoking a pipe, feasting on a whole chicken... and leading his servant Lucky around with a rope and barking orders at him. The choreographical duties imposed on Lucky are a tour de force of stage writing.
While drama is written to be performed, the text of WAITING FOR GODOT allows one to pick up on various subtleties missing from performance. One is amusing stage directions. When Vladimir says "I don't understand" and Estragon replies, "Use your intelligence, can't you?", there follows the direction "Vladimir uses his intelligence." In the theatre, many of the play's most profound comments come too quickly to be properly reflected upon and digested by the audience, but reading the play lets one proceed through Beckett's musings at one's own pace. Finally, reading the play lets one spot oddities about Beckett's own translation of the play from the original French, many slightly peculiar turns of phrase in English.
While the play's meagre plot of waiting for a God who never reveals himself is often seen as existentialist, reading the play reveals instead an absurdist perspective. Unlike those writers who felt that the absence of God forces Man to determine his purpose on his own, Beckett sees little possibility of purpose. Because of the lack of hope and the frustrations that fill the dialogue, WAITING FOR GODOT can be depressing and inexplicable to many. One's enjoyment from reading the play is dependent essentially on how comfortable one is with absurdism. Nonetheless, I'd recommend at least trying.
57 of 61 people found the following review helpful.
The Best Play of the 20th Century
By Jeremy M. Barker
Samuel Beckett's play seems to endlessly perplex reviewers: they want to see in it concrete associations that it generally denies them. Is Godot God? Are Didi and Gogo heroes for their seemingly indefatiguable faith he will arrive, or fools for hinging all their hopes and dreams on a man who never seems to arrive to help alleviate their suffering?
Waiting for Godot, in proper Modernist fashion, strips away all the layers of narrative and form and leaves nothing but the naked husk of a play, which Beckett no doubt felt revealed the human condition at its most basic. But the play's power doesn't really come from that. Rather, what makes Waiting for Godot so compelling is its wide applicability: it's a story about random oppression, brutality, and dreams deferred by harsh realities. It has been performed as an allegory of apartheid South African, the Jim Crow South, the horror of the war in Bosnia and about every other possible situation imaginable. Why? Because as Benjamin Kunkel pointed out in a piece in The New Yorker not so long ago, "[N]ot everyone has a God, but who doesn't have a Godot?"
Beyond the metaphysical implications of the play, though, it's popularity stems from its near-perfection: for all the philosophical meaning people see in it, the action progresses with virtually no direct reference to it, and every line which seems to suggests some sort of grand significance has a very concrete meaning in the action. Take the infamous opening: Estragon, the first of the tramps, struggles to pull off his boot to relieve his swollen foot. Unable to get it off, he gives up and announces "Nothing to be done." Vladimir, wincingly wandering onto the stage and grasping at his crotch (precious few readers and actors for that matter seem to grasp that one of the play's running jokes is Vladimir's venereal disease, which causes him immense pain when urinating), thinks Estragon is commenting on his own ailment, and announces, "I'm beginning to come round to that conclusion myself. All my life I've put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything! And I resumed the struggle."
On the one hand, the lines relate concretely to the action of the play; on the other, they have become representative of modern man's ambivalence towards a cruel and uncaring world, and such clever cynicism has linked Beckett to the French Existentialists in whose circles he moved after the Second World War. But seen merely as declamatory statements of world-weary cynicism, the lines lose all their power; Beckett's achievement comes from his ability to link such nihilistic sentiments to extremely comic moments, and it is the humor that carries the reader or the theatergoer through what would otherwise be an unbearably cynical play. Steve Martin, who played Vladimir in a famous 1982 production at the Lincoln Center in New York, put it best when he said that he sought to serve the humor of the play, because the meaning could carry itself but the humor could not. That's a lesson which, sadly, precious few theater directors seem to grasp, but which the careful reader discovers in Beckett. Definitely a must-read, but read it before seeing it, because few productions do it justice.
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