Interview
SAMUEL BECKETT WAITING FOR GODOT
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SAMUEL BECKETT WAITING FOR GODOT, LESSON
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SAMUEL BECKETT➤ VITA : Irish novelist, short story writer, poet and playwright.
Born 1906 in Dublin. Went to Paris to work as a teacher He became friend with Joyce.
Travelled a lot.
Ireland was a neutral country during 2nd WW ⇒ he was allowed to remain in Paris where he
fought with the Resistance until 1942. During the war wrote: Waiting for Godot 1952 ⇒
great success.
In the 1960s ⇒ career as a theater director. 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature.
He continued to writer near Paris where he could devote himself to writing and avoid
publicity.
He suffered serious health problem and died in 1989.
After Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, Happy Days, his theater became more essential,
language was replaced by silence, movements and actions were substituted by stillness.
This late plays corresponded to the author’s attempt to translate the existential void of
modernity through theater.
➤ Beckett as an ABSURDIST PLAYWRIGHT
Many of his plays belong to the theater of the Absurd genre in which disjointed meaningless
and repetitious dialogues reject any notion of logical plot development but offer an insight
into the absurdity of human existence. There may be meaning in the universe but men are
incapable of finding it.
Absurdist works in England extended the possibilities of post-war theater in a definition of
the world as mysterious and indecipherable, accompanied by feelings of confusion and
lack of purpose, no lacking in flashes of hope and human sympathy and moments of witty
dialogue.
Main structural FEATURES COMMON IN BECKETT’S PLAYS:
● the absence of traditional plot ⇒ no chain of events that characterize naturalistic
drama, but circular and tend to have no proper ending.
● mix of comedy and tragedy
● lack of proper action ⇒ characters’ actions are pointless and meaningless and do
not lead to end.
● the sense of meaninglessness of life: Beckett’s plays show characters who seem to
be LOST in a universe in which things have lost their meaning and signify nothing.
➤ PERCEPTION, EXISTENCE AND IMPRISONMENT
His plays tackle different themes:
➔ negation of time ⇒ growing sense of timelessness surrounds the characters, who
seem to have no past and no future. Their existence happens in an endless present,
which is characterized by the obsessive repetition of actions and meaningless
events.
➔ problem of perception ⇒ characters obsessed with the idea that they can be sure
of their existence only if someone perceives them and their actions. The fear of
non-existence cause the never-ending dialogues or monologues, whose aim is not
communicate, but give them the certainty that they exist.
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