Analysis Of Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot

Decent Essays
Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting For Godot has been described as a play in which “Nothing happens twice” (Mercier). In the literal sense this is not entirely true events do in fact unfold on the stage before the eyes of the audience. Vladimir and Estragon occupied themselves through various activities and speak to one another, Pozzo and Lucky come and go as does a young boy with a message. It is true that this is the progression of events in both acts, the second almost identical to the first. It is in this sense nothing happens fore if something had occurred then it would logically follow that the events of the first act would have an effect on the second. But no Vladimir and estragon continue waiting, paralyzed in thier perpetual state of inaction, …show more content…
Fore It is a play in which nothing much at all seems to happen. The events of the previous day do not effect the next and all the characters remain in there perpetual states of indecision and inaction. The audience watches and waits hoping that something will happen on the stage but they themselves have been deceived like Vladimir and Estragon. They have been made to hope and wait for nothing and have seen first hand the consequence of this. The first audiences who saw this play would have been right to walk out and leave for that would be escaping the mental prison that the work shows us and in effect imposes on it audience. We have a perception of the way things in a play ought to be and so we stay abiding by our own conceptions of the way things ought to be in the relationship of an audience to a play. We sit, watch and wait and something must happen, the events of a play must amount to something but they don 't and nothing has or will ever change. We have been shown by the play and by our own actions that believing something and acting according to that belief will only form our own personal mental prison in which we will torment ourselves eternally with what we think we ought to be doing with ourselves and our

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