Waiting for Godot
by Samuel Beckett
Summary
Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait beside a single bare tree on a country road for a man named Godot, who never comes, and Beckett gives them almost nothing to do while they wait but talk, quarrel, consider hanging themselves from the tree for lack of a rope, and pass the time with small vaudeville routines involving hats and boots. Partway through the first act, a landowner named Pozzo arrives driving his servant Lucky on a rope around his neck, and orders Lucky to think aloud for the others, producing a long, chaotic monologue that dissolves into nonsense before Pozzo drags him away again. A boy arrives near the end of the act to say that Godot will not come today, but will surely come tomorrow, and Vladimir and Estragon agree to leave and do not move.
The second act repeats nearly the same shape with small, unsettling differences: the tree now has a few leaves on it, Pozzo returns blind and Lucky mute, and neither pair of men recognizes having met the other before. The same boy delivers the same message about tomorrow, and Vladimir and Estragon again consider suicide, again find they have no rope, and again agree to leave the stage, and again do not move, the play ending exactly where it began, with two men still waiting.
Beckett strips the stage down to almost nothing, one tree, one road, four other people who pass through, and builds real comedy and real bleakness out of pure repetition rather than plot, so very little happens by any conventional measure while the play still manages to feel like it is about everything. It suits a reader or audience willing to accept that the waiting itself is the entire point, and it rewards patience with a strange, lasting warmth between Vladimir and Estragon that survives everything the play denies them.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Samuel Beckett the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature for writing that, in new forms for the novel and drama, in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation, honoring a play Beckett had written in French between 1948 and 1949 and then translated into English himself, first staged in Paris in January 1953 and in London two years later, where initial audience bewilderment turned around almost overnight once the critics Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson championed it in print. On hearing that Beckett had won, his partner Suzanne reportedly said only, what a catastrophe, dreading exactly the fame that soon arrived for a man who valued his privacy above almost anything else.
Beckett was on holiday in Tunisia with Suzanne when the prize was announced. He skipped the Stockholm ceremony and let his French publisher, Jérôme Lindon, the man the Academy's presentation speech credited with first recognizing the importance of his work, receive the prize from the King on his behalf, and he later gave the prize money away to friends rather than keeping it.