Post Modernism In Waiting For Godot

Post-modernism, which is otherwise quite a difficult and complicated term to understand, can be defined as a term that applies to the certain developments or a distinct style that figured prominently in a vast number of fields including critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature and culture. Postmodernism is generally considered to be a reaction against the earlier Movement – Modernism. Postmodernism emerges from Modernism, but at the same time, it is a critique of Modernism and of structures. Postmodernism tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity: contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, inter-referentiality. There are a number of distinct traits of Post-modern literature, e.g.,

1. . Postmodern literature presents a parody of the quest for meaning in a chaotic world.

2. Postmodern writers often celebrate chance over craft and employ metafiction/metatheatre to undermine the author’s univocal”control.

3. In postmodern literature, the distinction between high-culture and low-culture is attacked with the employment of pastiche, the combination of multiple cultural elements including subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature.

4.

Suspicious of all authority and especially of the authority of the founding texts of Western culture, Beckett studs Waiting for Godot with references to these very texts in order to make his readers think and speculate, to make them participate in his anxious oscillation between certainty about what is untrue and uncertainty about what may be true. This abdication of authorial power and this appeal to the creative intervention of readers mark Beckett out as one of the founding fathers of, and one of the major witnesses to, our post-modern