Waiting For Godot Analysis

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot has time and again been the center of critical attention since its publication in 1952. Various readings have been assigned to the play, ranging from reading the subtle homosexual references in the pairing of Vladimir and Estragon, to the Hindu philosophy underlined in the text. But the most worked upon critical analysis on Waiting for Godot is certainly categorizing the drama in the canon of absurdist theatre and finding existentialist tenets in it. Moving away from these popular readings, this paper attempts to offer a reading on the obsession with the non-happening or the non-event in the play, linking it with the postmodern idea of decentering. The paper will also show that the play, obsessed with decentering, finally ends up in coming up with a center and the absence of event in the play becomes an event itself.

Waiting for Godot is a play, where ‘nothing happens, nobody comes and nobody goes’.(I, 34) These line from the play itself is an indication of the non-event or non-happening in the play. In this context one can refer to Alain Badiou’s idea of ‘event’ and ‘truth’ from his Being and Event. Badiou’s philosophy is a kind of phenomenon that produces ‘truth’ and he

The same paradox can be found in Waiting for Godot. In order to decenter every possible center in the play, the play finds a center amidst its own decentering and gives birth to what can be called a decentered center. An ability to completely do away with any kind of event in the play, itself questions the deliberate attempt of absolute eventlessness. ‘Nothing happens’(I, 34) itself becomes a happening in the play, the non-event becomes an event. Simply because here can be no definite closure, the process of decentering or non-happening is a continuous process in postmodern sense. Influenced by one of the prominent postmodern theorists, Ihab Hassan, Hutcheon goes on to claim that Postmodernism is a never ending process that always tends to