Symbolism In Waiting For Godot

When we first finish reading Waiting for Godot, there is one question that comes through our mind: why so? The absence of a conclusive end of the play challenges us to wonder about the logic of writing something that appears to make no sense. In which way and to which point can Didi and Gogo be taken into consideration? Could they be representatives for the entire human being? But what could they represent – they do nothing but wait for someone about whom all we are told (and about whom they certainly know just as little) is that he is named Godot.

The two main characters awainting for Godot’s arrival and Godot’s continual absence creates a waste of time and so the waste of their lives. That makes them the victims of Godot and so the victims

And I do not know if they believe he does or doesn’t, those two who are waiting for him.”

From a religious point of view, Godot could be God. Becket does not know if He exists and he says that he also does not know if those who are waiting for Him believe in His existance, which shows exactly the questions humanity has been trying to answer to for centuries.

The boy comes and announces that Godot will surely come the next evening. Because of this, we intend to think Godot is real, but at a second thought we can ask ourselves who exactly is that boy, is he a real messanger or just a boy who has taken advantage of Didi and Gogo’s waiting and, maybe to amuse himself by watching their reactions, he thinks to announce them that Godot will come. If it is so, then who is the boy? Is he a superior form of human, a messanger from a superior form of ife or just a boy playing by himself, because, in his turn, he is tired of waiting for (maybe) Godot. But the next day comes and the boy arrives again and tells them Godot will not come at all. Whether the boy plays by himself or plays a role for someone else, we face the idea of uncertainty, as Estragon insists: „No, nothing is certain”

The confrontation of the audience with characters and happenings which they are not quite able to comprehend makes it impossible for them to share the aspirations and emotions depicted in the play. Brecht 's famous "Verfremdungseffekt" (alienation effect), the inhibition of any identification between spectator and actor, which Brecht could never successfully achieve in his own highly rational theatre, really comes into its own in the Theatre of the Absurd. It is impossible to identify oneself with characters one does not understand or whose motives remain a closed book, and so the distance between the public and the happenings on the stage can be maintained. Emotional identification with the characters is replaced by a puzzled, critical attention. For while the happenings on the stage are absurd, they yet remain recognizable as somehow related to real life with its absurdity, so that eventually the spectators are brought face to face with the irrational side of their existence. Thus, the absurd and fantastic goings-on of the Theatre of the Absurd will, in the end, be found to reveal the irrationality of the human condition and the