blog #3 topic 1 Tara Saljooghi

Estragon, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take off his boot. He pulls at it with both hands, panting. 

He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again.

As before.

Enter Vladimir.

ESTRAGON:

(giving up again). Nothing to be done.

VLADIMIR:

(advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart). I'm beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I've tried to put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle. (He broods, musing on the struggle. Turning to Estragon.) So there you are again.

ESTRAGON:

Am I?

VLADIMIR:

I'm glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever.

ESTRAGON:

Me too.

VLADIMIR:

Together again at last! We'll have to celebrate this. But how? (He reflects.) Get up till I embrace you.

ESTRAGON:

(irritably). Not now, not now.

VLADIMIR:

(hurt, coldly). May one inquire where His Highness spent the night?

ESTRAGON:

In a ditch.

VLADIMIR:

(admiringly). A ditch! Where?

ESTRAGON:

(without gesture). Over there.

VLADIMIR:

And they didn't beat you?

ESTRAGON:

Beat me? Certainly they beat me.

VLADIMIR:

The same lot as usual?

ESTRAGON:

The same? I don't know.

VLADIMIR:

When I think of it . . . all these years . . . but for me . . . where would you be . . . (Decisively.) You'd be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute, no doubt about it.

ESTRAGON:

And what of it?

VLADIMIR:

(gloomily). It's too much for one man. (Pause. Cheerfully.) On the other hand what's the good of losing heart now, that's what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties.

In the opening of the play, “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett, one can get a good understanding of the rest of the play by doing a close reading of the first few lines and looking at the vocab, diction, and patterns of the play.

The play focuses on dialogue between two characters: Estragon and Vladimir. The title of the play is basic background information given to the reader as to what these two characters are doing: they are waiting for Godot. There is repetition of actions and words that makes it seem as if the characters have short term memory loss and reveals that the characters’ lives are insignificant. Right off the bat, these short 20 lines suggest what the rest of the play is like. Beckett starts the play with “Nothing to be done” portraying the helplessness of the character when attempting at removing his shoes. Nothing to be done also has a triple meaning: the actual meaning in the text—Estragon is unable to remove his shoes and nothing can be done. This statement also carries out throughout the play and has an overarching meaning of nothingness where the characters have nothing to do besides wait. The third meaning is one in relation to the real world, where almost everyone lives a routine life where nothing changes and if something goes wrong, there usually is nothing to be done to fix it. This is one pattern shown in this play, where Beckett dose this to reiterate that the characters’ lives are meaningless as there is no purpose to live besides waiting for Godot. This repetition of “nothing to be done” gives the sense that nothing hopeful is coming their way—foreshadowing that Godot does not appear.

          Moving past the first line, the conversation amongst Estragon and Vladimir is very choppy and makes it seem as if these characters are uneducated by the way that they don’t hold a proper conversation, instead they are using basic words to get their idea across. There is no real substance in their diction, which overall lacks substance in their dialogue which then relates to how to the whole play lacks this substance creating a meaningless play. Beckett does this to portray how insignificant their lives are because through dialogue only, the reader cannot get a narrator’s voice or opinion on what is going on. This doesn’t allow the reader to get into the character’s heads to understand what is going on. Looking at the dialogue of the characters, the use of words such as “forever” and “all these years” signify that time is not real to these characters. They have no understanding of time in this play and think that one night is a long time. The reader is able to get this sense when the characters are confused even though they were with each other in the last 24 hours.  This further reinforces the plays emptiness.

Repetition is not seen in these 20 lines, but later on in the play variations of “nothing to be done” appears again which is there to again get the idea of insignificance of the characters’ lives across.

Overall, I think Beckett’s objective was to tell the reader how meaningless life can actually be. These two characters have nothing to do besides talk with each other as they wait for somebody who is not going to show up. Their conversations are meaningless portraying the overall message that life is meaningless and nothing can be done.