Waiting For Godot Critical Analysis

"The twentieth century has exhibited a barbarism and lack of respect for human life on a massive scale just about unknown before."
- Ron Silver
The modern age was a period which witnessed terrifying chain of events which jolted the stability of the entire globe, especially in the first half of the century. The end of the Second World War (1939-1945) did not restore a pre existing order. With the dropping of the atomic bomb, a certain kind of threat hung over the world. The modern man began to be identified with fear, hopelessness, silence, and an increasing sense of existential crisis. The theatre of this time is best known to represent the crisis of the modern world. A perspective of this world as incoherent and illogical, full of helpless

The absurdist themes of nothingness, oblivion, disability, despair, and uncertainty are central to the understanding of the play. Waiting for Godot is a play which does not do what it is supposed to do; that is, it does not tell us a story in an ordered and a proper manner. The play begins with one of the characters, Estragon, announcing “Nothing to be done”, and the audience is attacked in some consciousness with a solid denial of dramatic action in the history of theatre. The dialogue talks about the context of the speaker which is that he is unable to get rid of his boot despite continuous struggles, but it also sets in motion the general philosophical motif of the play –

The play throws many questions at the face of modern society and its institutions, questions which are uncertain and unsettled. Why do we require that things mean? What do we glorify the faculty of reason? Why are we impotent to receive, a simple truth, that we “give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams on an instant, then it’s night once more”? Waiting for Godot, as Esslin puts, “remains the clearest and most concise statement of its meaning and message, precisely because its uncertainties and irreducible ambiguities are an essential element of its total