Resumo de En Attendant Godot - Waiting For Godot

Enigmatic is an adjective which might describe Samuel Beckett's most renowned work. Even after fifty years lively solutions to its meaning abound. Current reader reviews from Amazon include, 'akin to the random scribblings of a two-year old or a mud-splattered canvas...Absurdism, though, seems such an insulting way of labeling such a masterpiece...somewhat akin to a conceptual artwork, in which the concept behind the artwork is more important than the sensual aesthetic experience or the entertainment value ...the last masterpiece of "high art... a reaction to the Holocaust and Hiroshima.......deconstructionist farm offal... The perfect inability on the part of people who should know better to say the "Emperor has no clothes" '

Attempting to critically analyse WFG is much like grabbing a slippery fish. Many are stymied by its elusive qualities. Yet, those unfocused on dissecting the work and just along for the ride, well - the play tends to hit home. When performed in San Quentin prison convicts believed Godot was the release they were all waiting on. So to, in sixties Poland people thought it was eventual escape from Russian oppression.

On the surface it is a simple play with even simpler dialogue. Beckett wrote it in what is regarded as tight French, an attempt to escape his swollen native English. Everything is stewed down to an essence, plot, setting, dialogue, characters, all of it, even the relationship dynamics are paired down. Yet, inside this simplicity its arguable genius lurks.

WFG works in almost the same way as a psychologists ink blot test. Perhaps another analogy might be an untried dot to dot drawing minus the numbers. For the observer there is something on the page. For some it is just a lazy mess, a pointless waste of time to indulge in. After all the writer never even bothered to put the numbers to the picture. Others are convinced they can make out a shape, perhaps even a detail and set off joining it up. Some finish and become convinced they've discovered the intricacies, the detailed and genuine shape, perhaps even the true meaning of the puzzle. As such there are a myriad of theories, opinions, interpretations, arguments on and surrounding this play. Many fit seamlessly within the framework of the play thus rendering a huge number of these propositions perfectly valid.

Waiting for Godot plays on the human desire to create a narrative, to make sense of something even if the points of reference are obscure and nonsensical. Beckett himself was first to acknowledge this, "I know no more about this play than anyone who just reads it attentively?I don't know what spirit I wrote it in. I know no more about the characters than what they say, what they do and what happens to them . . . Estragon, Vladimir, Pozzo, Lucky, I have only been able to know them a little, from far off, out of a need to understand them. They owe you some explanations, perhaps. Let them unravel.? Yet Beckett also stated, ??everything I have been able to learn, I have shown. It's not a great deal. But it's enough for me, quite enough. I'd go so far as to say that I would have been content with less?? And so the points of reference Beckett chose to put on his pages, to him were not obscure or nonsensical, there was a definite underlying clarity.

The brilliance of WFG is that for an audience or a reader it operates in the no man?s land between Beckett's contradictory statements. For an observer the WFG's points of reference seem mobile and malleable, ready to accept an interpretation. The play's genius lies in its ability to create this illusion for a person engaging with it. Yet, what Beckett learned is cemented into Waiting for Godot. Indeed, he is renowned for his dogged existentialist beliefs, much is written about it.

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