But again, as in the case of Vladimir, this intuition is undeveloped and unpursued Estragon prefers the constant escape of mindless conversations, silly games (“Boot on, boot off”), the delicacies of carrots or radishes, the distractions of Pozzo and Lucky, and the lure of quasi-narcolepsy. Some remain so.” 3 And at the beginning of the play, he opines: “Nothing to be done.” 4 This sets the tone for his frequent cynicism and suggests a sort of primordial intuition about his actual plight of being mired in nothingness (“There’s no lack of void”). After listening to Vladimir’s comment about the uselessness of reason, he pronounces: “We are all born mad. As Eva Metman suggests, “Godot’s function seems to be to keep his dependants unconscious.” 2 A critical moment passes and Vladimir slips again into habit, the action of inaction.Įstragon, the more passive and instinctive of the pair, although frequently living in a daze and subject to the lure of sleep and the thralldom of dreams, is not without insight into this abysmal world. However, at this exact moment when he seems poised to be conscious of the Heideggerian sense of Geworfenheit (or “thrownness”) and begin to fashion his own singular and creative world apart from Estragon and the rituals of waiting, the boy messenger returns and Vladimir once again lapses into the fate of waiting for the mysterious Godot. (Pause.) I can’t go on! (Pause.) What have I said? 1 (He looks again at Estragon.) At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, he is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. (He listens.) But habit is a great deadener. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. (Pause) Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. He’ll tell me about the blows he received and I’ll give him a carrot. Vladimir looks at him.) He’ll know nothing. But in all that what truth will there be? (Estragon, having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing off again. Vladimir: Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. Although scarcely an epistemologist or metaphysician, Vladimir has moments of lucidity in regard to their situation: The two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, have nothing significant to do with their lives other than waiting for the inscrutable Godot, or any significant place to be other than by the side of a road in the middle of nowhere.
“Let’s go.”-“We can’t.”-“Why not?”-“We’re waiting for Godot.”-“Ah.” With this infamous refrain, Samuel Beckett introduces the strange world of Waiting for Godot. John Valentine, Savannah College of Art and Design
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