Samuel Beckett

grim, much different than Stoppard comedic tragedy. This difference may have to do with the personal background of each playwright. Tom Stoppard was a child during the outbreak of World War II but Samuel Beckett was an active member of the French Resistance. As an Irishman helping the French, Beckett fearfully watched WWII much like his characters Vladimir and Estragon fearfully watched the episodes of Pozzo and Lucky. In contrast, Stoppard was a child still discovering the world during WWII.…

In Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape, an older man celebrates his sixty-ninth birthday in his office, but listens to past recordings of himself from thirty years ago. Beckett emphasizes eloquently described movements and symbolism of everyday objects to reveal how resolutions from the past tends to turn into hypocrisy in the future. Beckett uses the movements of Krapp to describe the tiredness and resentment that he has for himself, yet they are broken promises he commits. He…

Samuel Beckett’s two-act tragicomedy Waiting for Godot depicts the endless wait of two homeless men, for a man named Godot. Their endless cycle of waiting and thus suffering continues and repeats itself until it is stopped by someone who instead of waiting for false hope, chooses to find this hope on their own terms. A key piece of the play that reflects this idea is the song that Vladimir sings in the beginning of the second act. A song about a dog that stole a piece of bread and thus beaten…

In the play Endgame, written by Samuel Beckett, there is a particular passage that involves two harmless characters, Nagg and Nell, giggling over their sons’ sadness and woeful state of mind. When reproducing the dialogue between these two parents, this passage conveys how these two laugh and make fun of their own son while he sinks into depression. In addition, Nell, the mother, oddly compares suffering with happiness and positive feelings. Because, in her own way it is allowing her to escape…

Vladimir is often characterized as a tramp , as seen in both figure 2 and 3, which are homeless people who detached from the society. However, there are no specific physical descriptions in the script to suggest they are tramps. Beckett refusing to be drawn to the backgrounds of the characters encourages the actors to look for their own motivations. So, the actors should not let the identity of tramps restrain their understanding and acting of the play. The reason why most of the…

Evening.” These stage directions preface Samuel Beckett’s tragicomedy “Waiting for Godot.” In the play, two men meet on this sparse, forlorn stage and attempt to make sense of their obscure world through encounters with mysterious characters and the prospects of finding purpose upon the arrival of a character they call Godot. The two men, Estragon and Vladimir, experience very little action or significant adventure in regards to the plot. Still, Beckett, regarded by some as a nihilist, manages…

In disregarding, and arguably transcending, many of the novel’s comforts and seemingly essential characteristics, Beckett frequently presented a premise and its immediate contradiction. As Robbe-Grillet (1957, p.53) aptly observes, “Even in Beckett, there is no lack of events, but these events are constantly in the process of contesting themselves, jeopardizing themselves, destroying themselves, so that the same sentence may contain…

The ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ is a post- World War II concept. The first and the most important playwrights of this movement were Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Arthur Adamov and Jean Genet. These plays focus on or represent the absurdity of human existence. Absurdity in this context means disharmony or meaninglessness. This style of writing was first used by Samuel Beckett in his play ‘En Attendant Godot’ between the years 1948 to 1949. This play was originally written and performed in French in…

Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett) Waiting for Godot is a play about two men seeking for hope and salvation, Vladimir and Estragon. In a country road (Beckett,1) with a single tree on a hill, they patiently waited aimlessly for someone whose arrival is uncertain, Godot. This play falls under tragedy and comedy. Tragic, in a sense that they are hoping for a day that Godot might come but all that is happening to them are just repeated incidence of the past days, and comedy because there are…

“Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful.” This quote extracted from Waiting for Godot, an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett that premiered on 5 January 1953, holds the essence of absurdist theatre and what its playwrights seek to express- the inescapable meaningless and futility of life. The origins of absurdist theatre are commonly linked to the avant-garde experimentations of the 19th century, but there has been speculation that there were traces of absurdist theatre in works…