Blog 3, prompt 2

Colette Weese

Blog Post #3, Prompt 2

            It is not possible to do a true close reading of “Waiting for Godot” because each section of the play discusses the same absurdist and/or surrealist philosophies over and over again, and pulling any one chunk away from the rest of the text actually detracts from a deeper understanding of the repetitive pointlessness as a metaphor for life. In other words, “Waiting for Godot” is not well suited for close readings, because each close reading analysis would be practically the same, and arguably the most impactful aspect of the play is its length and repetition. That being said, please enjoy this close reading from Act I of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.”

Estragon, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take off his boot. He pulls at it with both hands, panting. #

He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again.

As before.

Enter Vladimir.

ESTRAGON:

(giving up again). Nothing to be done.

VLADIMIR:

(advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart). I'm beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I've tried to put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle. (He broods, musing on the struggle. Turning to Estragon.) So there you are again.

ESTRAGON:

Am I?

VLADIMIR:

I'm glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever.

ESTRAGON:

Me too.

VLADIMIR:

Together again at last! We'll have to celebrate this. But how? (He reflects.) Get up till I embrace you.

ESTRAGON:

(irritably). Not now, not now.

VLADIMIR:

(hurt, coldly). May one inquire where His Highness spent the night?

ESTRAGON:

In a ditch.

VLADIMIR:

(admiringly). A ditch! Where?

ESTRAGON:

(without gesture). Over there.

VLADIMIR:

And they didn't beat you?

ESTRAGON:

Beat me? Certainly they beat me.

VLADIMIR:

The same lot as usual?

ESTRAGON:

The same? I don't know.

VLADIMIR:

When I think of it . . . all these years . . . but for me . . . where would you be . . . (Decisively.) You'd be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute, no doubt about it.

ESTRAGON:

And what of it?

VLADIMIR:

(gloomily). It's too much for one man. (Pause. Cheerfully.) On the other hand what's the good of losing heart now, that's what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties.

            In the opening scene, “Waiting for Godot” communicates nearly all of what it will communicate in the rest of the play, which a closer look at the vocabulary, diction, and patterns can reveal.

            The opening line, “Nothing to be done,” immediately alerts the audience to the characters’ helplessness, weakness, or inferiority in the face of some challenge, in this case removing feet from painful boots. “Nothing to be done” contains a bit of a double meaning, in that there is nothing to be done about this grand nothingness that demands to be done. Because the characters have nothing to do, they are forced to do nothing, and there is “nothing to be done.” This line appears several more times throughout the play, as the characters are never in a situation with a) purpose, or b) anything for them to contribute. The repetition of this adds to a sense of inescapability and captures the absurdist elements of the play. The reappearances of this line also add to the futility of performing a carefully selected close reading because several sections of the play contain this line (or a similar statement) and would lead the reader to the same conclusion.

            Beyond the first line, the rest of the dialogue is choppy, dismal, and sets the scene as just a bit off. There are surrealist influences, seen in the repetitive action of desperately trying to take off a boot, the obscurity of the setting, the history of the characters, who the people are that beat Estragon, and mainly why the two men are there. The characters exist in a strange, ambiguous, empty space, contributing to the feelings of desolation and irrelevance that Beckett is asking the audience to apply to life. The setting never changes and we never get any more information. The surrealism is constant throughout the play, so any close reading that focuses on the setting or surrealism would lead the reader to the same conclusion. 

            Finally, what is left out of this section is Godot, the person/thing that the men are waiting for. Depending on the interpretation, Godot is God, salvation, purpose, etc., but he never arrives. This is a statement on its own that one could apply to any section of the play chosen for a close reading, but the full impact of it comes with reading the entire play. After all this waiting, Godot, and all that he stands for, never arrives, and the magnitude of this cannot be captured in a limited close reading.

            In essence, if every close reading produces essentially the same conclusion, then the various close readings are not really separate, but rather just one big reading that leads the reader to a set of concluding thoughts. So, one can technically do a close reading of “Waiting for Godot,” it’s just a little bit pointless, which is itself a manifestation of the absurdism in “Waiting for Godot." :(