Summary Exemplar (25/25) English Extension 1 Trial Comparative Essay - Waiting for Godot, Seamus Heaney and Milkman
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Module
English
Institution
12th Grade
This comparative essay focusses on three texts, Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot', Heaney's body of poetic works and Burns' seminal novel 'Milkman'.
This essay achieved full marks twice internally, and was also used in the HSC, helping me to attain a score of 48/50 (96 equivalent) overall for the su...
Introduction
During periods of socio-political upheaval, composers subvert challenge
conventional literary form and genre to oppose existing societal constructs
responsible for subjugation provoking thought and change so that individual
and collective perspectives can be shifted. The three texts - Samuel Beckett’s
absurdist play Waiting for Godot, Seamus Heaney’s poems Whatever You
Say, Say Nothing, Casualty and Triptych, and Anne Burns postmodern novel
Milkman illustrate how ecosystems of fear and paranoia formed by sectarian
and political violence, catalyse a breakdown of interpersonal communication,
restricting individuals from voicing their lived experiences. Concurrently
however, the three composers posit that it is through the oppositional power of
defiant creative expression by which this cycle can be broken, and
voicelessness and suffering transcended.
Waiting for Godot
Through his construction of the world within Waiting for Godot, Beckett
emphasises how ecosystems of fear and paranoia restrict individuals from
expressing their lived experiences and thereby rebelling against the political
institutions that oppress them. Reflecting the threat of nuclear annihilation
during the Cold War which stripped the individual of any “grandiose purpose or
meaning” (Elizabeth. L. Bolick), Beckett demonstrates how collective paranoia
degenerates authentic communication. Beckett represents the the disorienting
ramifications of this fear of annihilation formally, dismantling the conventional
three-act expository structure, and instead embracing the ‘Theatre of the
Absurd’, utilising a cyclical two-act narrative which “does not proceed in logical
syllogism” (Esslin). This absurdism is demonstrated in the stichomythic
cross-talk Estragon and Vladimir - “Certainly they beat me/The same lot as
usual?”, where Beckett employs an interplay between language and silence
coupled with a series of rhetorical questions. This underscores Estragon's
amnesiac incapacity to articulate the identity of his oppressors with Beckett
alluding to the Nazi’s Gestapo, whose clandestine operations stripped the
German populace of their ability to verbalise dissent, ensnaring them, like
Vladimir and Estragon, within perpetual voicelessness. Beckett details the
scope of linguistic regression in Lucky’s monologue, a “cyclical schizophasia”
(Charlier), representative of the incomprehensibility of the character’s
traumatic predicament. Specifically, his portrayal of God as suffering from
“divine aphasia”, suggests that even the ostensibly “personal God” has been
stripped of his communicative and thereby emancipatory capacity by the
twentieth century’s movement towards Humanistic rationality. This impetus on
unfettered progression is satirised through the monologue’s “empty
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