Waiting For Godo Essay

One of the few unarguable intents of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is the author’s desire to impact his audience. With floating images, an obscure story line, and nonsensical dialogue, the reader is continually delving into Beckett’s text for further meaning in the play. Ironically, Beckett’s absurdist messages suggest that it is this sort of search for order in an irrational universe that will only lead to conflict. Within his play Beckett makes several attempts to satirize human beings’ need for order. He targets both religious organization and social structure. More specifically, in Waiting for Godot, Beckett criticizes the institution of western capitalism through the relationships of his characters.

Samuel Beckett’s existentialist ideas clearly influenced his writings. The movement’s stress of the individual existence and its portrayal of human beings as totally free and responsible for their own actions does not promote rules in life and structured institutions. The belief in the irreducibility of experience to any system is also at the core of existentialist thought. Thus, reducing people’s lives to economic classes and containing them in this social hierarchy

violated existentialist ideas. Beckett places each of his main characters in defined Marxist roles to illustrate this point.

if we dropped him? (Pause) If we dropped him?

Pozzo recalls that Lucky’s bondage over the course of his slavery has changed him:

Beckett’s existentialistic nature made him believe that rationalizing our chaotic universe would only lead to disorder. Attempting to explain why people exist and fitting their lives into molds will only result in conflict. This play expresses how social and economic order will inevitably result in class conflict and revolution. Using Marxist theory and an existentialist view, Waiting for Godot can be read as commentary on the eventual turmoil of capitalism.

POZZO: Certainly, Aloud. He even used to think very prettily once, I could listen to him for hours. Now… (he shudders). So much the worse for me… (Act I 41)

VLADIMIR: He’d punish us. (Act II 107)

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