Miscellaneous Critics on Waiting for Godot :: Waiting Godot Essays

NothingnessAccordingly, any interpretation that purports to know who Godot is (or is not), whether he exists whether he will ever come, whether he has ever come, or heretofore whether he may have come with come on being recognized (or maybe in disguise) is, if not demonstrably wrong, at least not demonstrably right (Hutchings 27).Although gos of the theater of the absurd, particularly Becketts, are often comical, their be premises are wholly serious the epistemological principle of indecision and the inability in the modern age to find a recollective system of importee, order, or purpose by which to understand our existence and by which to live (Hutchings 28).Godots characters do not despair in the feeling of their situation, and this perseverance remains constant throughout a body of work that, in the words of the citation awarding Beckett the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 had transmuted the destitution of modern man into his exaltation (qtd. in Bair 606) (Hutchings 3 0).Many colligate the blowout to existentialismGod is dead, life is absurd, existence precedes essence, ennui is autochthonic to the human conditionIn many ways, such a nurture is an evasion of the plays complexity, a way of putting to respite the uncertainty of ones response to it (Collins 33).The reader, like modern man, must(prenominal) not give into the arrogant boldness of certitude or the enfeeble despair of skepticism, but instead must live in uncertainty, poised, by the conditions of our humanity and of the world in which we live, between certitude and skepticism, between presumption and despair (Collins 36).Tragicomedy is life enhancing because it tries to remind the audience of the real hold to face existence knowing the worst, which ultimately is liberation, with courage and humility of not taking oneself or ones own pain overly seriously, and to bear all lifes mysteries and uncertainties and thus to make the intimately of what we have rather than to hanker aft (prenominal) illusory certainties and rewards (Esslin, Theater 47). make out II. The next day. But is it really the next day? Or after? Or before? (Esslin, Presence 109).Many details point out the absence of (meaninglessness of) traditional time, which is vertical one of many ways that the play resists interpretation and meaningPeople misunderstand it on all sides, just as everyone does his own sorrow. Explanations flow in from all quarters, each more than pointless than the last (Esslin, Presence 110). Some of the many attempts to impose meaning on the play include