Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Waiting for Godot

In "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett, the characters' lives are full of meaningless repetition. Beckett portrayed them as he would describe human nature in his eyes which is purposeless unless you can find some sort of reason to live on. Most of the characters are stuck in a mindless vortex and can never quite escape it, nor do they seem to notice it's existence. For example, Gogo started and ended the play in the same fashion  with no real progress throughout the plot. He finds himself tied to Didi and the tree waiting for Godot to appear. And even though he expresses the want to move on, he cannot seem to find the motivation to carry out any sort of action. Gogo lacks any sort of conscious or comprehend able thought processes. Didi seems to represent the human race as a species with no outer purpose in life and one of repetitive and circular events. Beckett poses the question on whether or not humans do have some sort of reason for being on earth and living besides one of just existence.

Though it may seem like an easy question to answer based on the play, at the very end of the book Gogo realizes to some extent how absurd his life is at the moment. I think that even though he became aware of his situation, he was scared of how to treat his discovery. He soon reverted back to the bland life of the past. Gogo did not know where to start looking for meaning in life and I think at the time, it may have been a larger task than he would like to have tried to accomplish. Plus, he probably thought it was better to have no meaning in life than to try to find meaning, fail, and be forced to return to a purposeless living style.

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