In Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, the two main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, spend the entire duration of the text waiting for the illusive Godot, leaving the two in a cyclic and repetitive course of events as they wait for him to...

“We can always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?”[1] Samuel Beckett’s character Estragon asks his friend Vladimir in Beckett’s tragicomedy, Waiting for Godot. This postmodernist play has provoked an enormous amount of...

How does civilization progress? How do the ideals and standards of a society change over time and adapt to technological advances? Throughout the majority of recorded history, progress and change in this sense is the result of an antithesis, or an...

Throughout Waiting for Godot, Beckett uses memory as a means to anchor the isolated setting in the context of some kind of surrounding world, frequently undermining this ‘anchor’ by presenting the past, and the protagonists’ recollections of it,...

The devastating events of WWII and the dropping of the Atomic Bomb in 1945 ruptured the foundations of both the physical and psychological position of mankind, provoking an Existential crisis of faith that called into question the possibility of...

Beckett condemns humanity that’s ailing from positive schizophrenic disorder, whereby the symptoms are hallucinations and delusions. The protagonists are in a treacherous illusion that their “personal god” (30) can resolve their existential crisis...

Beckett is fundamentally anti-logocentric. Throughout his work, he rejects the view that there is an essential order that can be discovered through reason. This is nowhere more clear than in Three Dialogues (1949), in which he deplores centuries...

Waiting for Godot is a play characterized under the genre of The Theatre of the Absurd, where communication is said to collapse and thus the dialogue consists of meaningless phrases only. The silence produced as a consequence serves as a...

Texts written in the After the Bomb period represent the personal and political consequences of an era. George Clooney’s Good Night And Good Luck, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, and Oliver Stone’s film,...

The Significance of Institutions: Nadja, The Stranger, and Waiting for Godot Our human society is ruled by institutions. We cannot even fathom a life without them. We might think we have freedom, but there is only a certain amount of freedom we...

In his play, "Waiting for Godot", Samuel Beckett communicates an existentialist perception of meaning as a concept through the interaction between the characters, Vladimir and Estragon. The conversations between the two men reveal various...

In Act Without Words (1956), Samuel Beckett strips the human condition to its barest level of existence, the “last extremity of meat – or bones” (Connor 181). The play is no longer than four pages, but, in those few pages, Beckett confronts...

The title of Beckett’s play, ‘Act Without Words I’, betrays an immediate awareness of its dual status as a text on a page and as a thing intended to be used for performance. The title, lacking an indefinite article preceding it, could be read...

Perhaps the most memorable scene from Happy Days by Samuel Beckett, the burning of Winnie’s parasol is chock-full of meaning. Specifically, it represents Winnie’s desire, if not necessity, for repetition. Right after the parasol goes up in smoke...

‘Accordingly, he took the paper and lowered his spectacles, measured the space at his command, reached his pen and examined it, dipped it in the ink and examined it again, then pushed the paper a little way from him, lifted up his spectacles...

Beckett once stated in regard to his plays that “any production which ignores my stage directions is completely unacceptable to me”[1]; a famous rule cautioning the director from straying far from the playwright’s vision. Crucially, Beckett’s...

Beckett’s depiction of the human body is noteworthy for a few reasons. The parts of the body he emphasizes are all linked to some sort of sensory experience, specifically sight and touch. The choice to evoke these two senses specifically, as...

Beckett’s depiction of the human body is noteworthy for a few reasons. The parts of the body he emphasizes are all linked to some sort of sensory experience, specifically sight and touch. The choice to evoke these two senses specifically, as...