Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf Analysis

The play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, plays a lot into the idea that the characters in the play know something the audience don’t, and this concept is present through the entire play. A good example of this occurs before the play even begins. The title, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, is a little song which is sung by the characters at different intervals in the play, with no explanation as to what the title means. The author of the play, Edward Albee, said in an interview that it was a play on ‘who’s afraid of the big bad wolf’, a nursery rhyme, and Virginia Woolf being added means “who’s afraid of living life without false illusions” ("The Art of Theatre." Interview by William Flanagan. The Paris Review).

The concept of ‘false illusions’ is extremely present in both plays, where it seems the ‘truths’ in the plays are ever changing, often making it hard for an audience to keep up since the lines between reality and illusion become blurred almost beyond the point of recognition.

In Waiting for Godot, a strong illusion is the characters names. The name of a character in literature is usually one which is constant and never changes and ones name is what mainly proves one’s own existence (Withanage, Ishara Hansani. Waiting for Nothing; an Analysis of “Waiting for Godot” By Samuel Beckett. Skemman.)This is not the case in Waiting for Godot, as the characters names change, out of confusion it seems, throughout the play. Vladimir and Estragon go by many different names such