—The Fascination of Waiting for Godot

Zhang Huaming

Beckett is well known as an absurd dramatist as well as a novelist of no negligible standing. Within his long and productive career, he wrote works that are strongly suggestive of two permanent literary phases –Modernism and postmodernism, and this feature has helped make him a truly seminal figure in the literature of his century. 

As a playwright, he helped bring the drama of the absurd into existence in the 1950s and 1960s, and has been regarded as the most important post-Shaw playwright in recent literary history. Beckett’s major concern is with the human condition, he learned about the nature of modern life and man’s lot in the universe so that he felt the need to increase the awareness of the his fellow creatures and keep them awake about their plight. His plays reveal the basic plight of modern man’s condition, of which, many are unaware of though already suffering in it. In a word, they are all existentialists of a kind trying to make sense of their senseless lives.
Waiting for Godot is the most famous of all his plays. It was originally written in French in 1948, Beckett personally translated the play into English. The work is thematically concerned with man’s salvation through God’s grace. The drama depicts a world that goes through a phrase of crisis of faith. Godot, the miniature of God in a point of fact, never appears despite the long anxious waiting on the part of the vagabonds. No one is sure whether the God still exists, but He has already shown his indifference to man’s lot, feeling no love and compassion for humanity, or the need to communicate with it. He may have condemned the human species without good reason, and have pushed it over to the abyss of agony and suffering.
The play seems to be a big pile of nonsense, filled with a whole lot of “sound and fury,” but “signifies nothing.” The tramps engage in no meaningful activities. They talk nonsense and so do Pozzo and Lucky. There is no meaningful relationship between these people. A striking sense of absurdity keeps assailing the readers as well as the audience. Yet the nonsense people read or hear is not entirely without its redeeming virtue: it amuses and forces people to think good and deep about the questions they keep popping up: why do these people behave the way they do? Do they inhabit the same universe as we do? The readers and audience begin to relate to the absurdity of the existence of the characters. They begin to sense it existing in their own lives and realize the absurd nature of human condition in general.
The play touched upon the very nature of life as it is lived. The time was WWII, the intellectual milieu was existentialist by and large, and the people felt the truth of the Existentialist tenets –alienation, gloom, and helplessness in face of an utterly humdrum, static environment. The tramps body forth the common humanity in the homelessness, want of physical and spiritual belonging. The redeeming quality these people possess, which delights the common run of humankind and hold and hook the audience, is their wish to live on and their hope that comes from their wish. The fact that the two are still waiting may indicate the strength of the human spirit –its tenacity and perseverance and its never giving up on life and man. This spirit can help man to transcend his own spatial and temporal limits and invigorate his life with significance. This is the fascination that the play holds for the people even today.

Zhang Huaming

http://tianyalit.blogspot.com/

My name is Zhang Huaming, and I also have an English name, Perry. In the year 1997, I graduated in a normal school in Gan Su, China, and became a high school English teacher. After 7 years of teaching, I went to Northwest Normal University to have my further education, majored in English, and got a Bachelor's Degree in 2006. In the same year, I passed the post-graduate exams in Northwest Normal University and will get my M. A in June, 2009. My major is English Language and Literature, orientation being English Literature. Meanwhile I have been teaching in several colleges as an external lecturer for 3 years.

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