Waiting for Godot: A Philosophical Reading in the Midst of Nothingness and Radical Uncertainty

Part of Rubedo by Reha Kuldasli, an ongoing project on philosophy, psychology, and symbolism.

As the title suggests, Beckett's famous play unfolds around waiting for Godot, somewhere in the Cackon country, a place that exists nowhere in our world. Its two central figures, Vladimir and Estragon, wait insistently for a mysterious Godot who is always expected and never arrives, sending instead only messengers to say that he will not come tonight, but surely tomorrow. The play could give rise to any number of separate readings, and I want to offer a heterogeneous one that draws several threads together without settling on a single centre. This seems to me a legitimate way to proceed: if the play has a centre at all, and that centre would be Godot, then the centre is itself an absence, and an absence can be approached from many directions at once. The play takes place around this absolute absence, in the singularity of a moment that endlessly reproduces it.

For Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for Godot is almost a religious command, one they never think to question closely. They believe Godot will come and save them, though it remains deeply unclear what he has to offer, or from what, exactly, he would save them, since saving always implies some threat close at hand. They do not know his face, mistake everyone they meet for him, and cannot say why they wait for him at all. The only certainty is that they must wait. This "have to" operates like a law governing their entire world, a world organized around the single act of waiting for Godot. It functions almost as a categorical imperative, one we are introduced to only through the play itself, and in this Godot-centric universe it might even be phrased: 'Wait for Godot in such a manner that even Godot's not coming would not affect your act of waiting.'

I prefer "act of waiting" to mere "waiting," because what Vladimir and Estragon do cannot be called complete passivity, despite the inertia they so often display. This act of waiting hovers somewhere between activity and passivity, reaching toward both extremes on the scale and settling into neither. As the analysis below will show, the two of them, however ridiculous their manner, keep responding to what happens around them, each according to his own nature.

The play opens with Estragon locked in a fruitless struggle to remove his boot. Vladimir soon enters and urges him not to give up before he has truly tried. Their conversation suggests that they were, at least once, struggling for some cause, though that cause remains as complete a mystery as Godot himself, perhaps more inaccessible still. Just as we know nothing of Godot, the play tells us nothing of this cause: whether political, or private and personal, we cannot say. Yet it is presented in such a way that this cause seems bound up with their waiting for Godot, and with the regular beatings Estragon receives.

The play is dense with repetitions that reward attention. At one point, while struggling with his boots, Estragon asks Vladimir for help. Vladimir asks, "it hurts?" and Estragon snaps back, "Hurts! He wants to know if it hurts!"¹ Vladimir grows angry, and tells Estragon, with some contempt, that he wonders what Estragon would do if he had what Vladimir has. Estragon then repeats the same question, "it hurts?" and Vladimir answers in kind: "It hurts! He wants to know if it hurts!"² The second utterance uses the same signifiers, in the same order, yet signifies something different. In Saussurean terms, identical signifiers can point to different signifieds, since language allows no fixed, one-to-one correspondence between them. This reveals the flexibility of language, outside of which there is no separate reality to appeal to. Such flexibility allows an economy within language itself: the work of signification, and the particular bonds between signifiers and signifieds, remain always subject to change. Connections are abandoned, new ones formed, and grammatical rules reshape themselves according to a language's own internal necessities, dynamics, and capacities.

At one point in their conversation, Vladimir asks Estragon what if they repented.³ Estragon cannot say what they would repent of, and Vladimir offers no explanation. The first thing that occurs to Estragon is their having been born. Being born, the one cardinal event in a life over which no one has any control, since no one ever chooses to be born or not, is treated here as something almost worth repenting, as though it were a deed that might have gone uncommitted by the one who bears it. This thought, closely tied to the Christian notion of eternal sin and not reducible to mere naivety on Estragon's part, treats human existence itself as marked by original sin. Indeed, his naïve question, "Our being born?" can be read as an instance of how this mode of thinking, which loads responsibility and regret onto events no one can control, comes to feel natural.

Vladimir betrays the same perspective. While telling Estragon the biblical story of the two thieves and the four Evangelists, he finds himself searching for the opposite of "saved," and lands on "damned" (p.14). To be "saved" requires an agent, the "Saviour," which is to say it is an act that comes from outside, extraordinary and arbitrary. We are never told why one of the two thieves is saved and not the other, and it does not matter. Vladimir questions the reliability of the biblical story, finding gaps in it, yet he never questions the notion of a "Saviour" itself. That the opposite he settles on is "damned" reveals another face of this same Christian idea of eternal sin: human beings, by virtue of a sinful nature attributed to them, are by default "damned." Human being, whose natural place is imagined within the flames of eternal damnation, must be "saved" by a "Saviour," the only one entitled to perform such an act. Since the act of grace depends entirely on this so-called Saviour's will, one can only wait for it, if it comes at all, filling the meantime, not growing attached to mundane affairs, never forgetting his possible, if improbable, arrival.

This notion of the Christian "Saviour" connects directly to Godot. Like the Saviour, Godot is awaited without ever being questioned. The bond that Estragon and Vladimir share with him is, at bottom, a bond of faith, akin to the Christian doctrine of the Second Coming, which asks for absolute faith in Christ's return. Their faith in Godot's arrival is just as strong, which is why they wait constantly and arrange their entire existence around the possible, improbable moment of his showing up. This is not to claim a perfect correspondence between the play's themes and those of Christianity; some elements fall outside it entirely. In Christianity, God's will answers to no other agency; God consults no one else in exercising it. In the play, however, Vladimir and Estragon tell us that Godot must think things over, must consult his family, his agents, his correspondents, his books, his bank accounts, before he can decide.⁴ Godot may have told Vladimir this simply to be rid of him, but even so, it suggests that Godot is not an absolutely autonomous being.

A second point of divergence concerns promising. Vladimir tells us that Godot could not promise him anything.⁵ The Saviour's coming, by contrast, is something promised outright, fixed to happen on the Day of Judgement.

Having briefly considered what Godot and the waiting for him mean, it is time to introduce the play's other two characters: Pozzo and Lucky. They enter just after Estragon asks Vladimir whether the two of them are tied to Godot.⁶ Vladimir refuses even to consider the question, yet one could say they are tied to Godot on a pre-conscious level. As I see it, this rope is pre-conscious precisely because they are aware of it even as there is no physical cord to see: though nothing binds them bodily, they cannot leave the place where Godot is meant to appear. It is as if they were tied to the ground itself.

Between Lucky and Pozzo, though, we see an actual rope. Lucky is Pozzo's slave; he carries Pozzo's bags, while Pozzo drives him along with a whip. Vladimir and Estragon at first mistake Pozzo for Godot, and even once Pozzo introduces himself, they fail to place him. They then try to wrestle out a meaning on the level of signifiers alone. Vladimir searches desperately for words close to "Pozzo" and recalls once knowing a family called Gozzo, as though proximity among signifiers must guarantee a corresponding proximity among signifieds. It does not, as his fruitless search for a signified to match the signifier Pozzo makes clear, a result of language's differential nature. Saussure describes language as two streams, one of signifiers and one of signifieds, each continuous in itself.⁷ A given signifier arises from its difference with other terms and attaches to a signified that is, likewise, what it is only by not being something else. One of the central Saussurean insights is that the bond between a particular signifier and its signified is purely conventional and arbitrary. Nor does proximity on one level guarantee proximity on the other: the closeness of 'oil' and 'owl' as signifiers implies no semantic closeness at all. This is why Vladimir's blind search among signifiers, hoping to recognize Pozzo, comes up empty.

Let us return, now, to the rope by which Pozzo controls Lucky. It symbolizes, in its way, the whole relationship between them. Pozzo is Lucky's master, and displays every classical trait of mastery toward him: he carries a whip, uses it on Lucky whenever he pleases, and treats him almost as an extension of his own body, from which no resistance is expected. Yet Lucky is no classical slave, utterly powerless, unable to resist, consoling himself with some invented interiority. At certain moments he acts out quite aggressively. When, for instance, Lucky weeps on hearing that his master would like to be rid of him, would like, in his words, to kill such creatures, Estragon feels pity for him.⁸ Pozzo tells Estragon that he may comfort Lucky if he wishes, but warns that Lucky cannot bear strangers. The warning proves true almost at once: without a second thought, Lucky kicks Estragon as he tries to wipe away his tears. That Lucky barely resists his own master does not mean he would accept as a master anyone Pozzo happens to treat as an equal. The bond between Pozzo and Lucky belongs only to the two of them; the story implies no wider social order of masters and slaves.

Once he has kicked Estragon hard, Lucky stops weeping. Pozzo offers his own commentary: "The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors."⁹ For Pozzo, joy and sorrow depend on each other; wherever there is joy, there must also be suffering somewhere. The final clause can also be read as an argument against romanticism. It is almost a reflex of human beings, under unfavourable conditions, to leap toward nostalgia, as though things were better once, a symptom of thinking that treats history as the history of humanity's fall. But no earthly heaven has ever existed: there has never been a golden age of peace and abundance in which no one suffered. What happens, rather, is that memory erodes over time, leaving behind a 'neat' image of the past, as though everything had once been simpler and easier to bear. Every period carries its own complexities, difficulties, and sufferings, along with its own share of joy, according to its own internal dynamics. No generation, then, is any unhappier or more fortunate than those before it, since no period can truly be measured against another. Suffering is woven into life itself; it is not a human invention.

Pozzo also points, more than once, to the constant change and instability at the heart of life. Speaking of the sky's beauty, he says: "but behind this veil of gentleness and peace night is charging ... and will burst upon us ... pop! like that! ... [j]ust when we least expect it. That's how it is on this bitch of an earth."¹⁰ Nothing lasts; everything is subject to change and becoming. Nothing in the universe stands exempt from movement and differentiation, and it is this very differentiation that constitutes phenomena in the first place. Yet this differentiation belongs to no causal context: it is not the effect of some always-external cause, nor a strife between fixed identities, but rather a movement that constitutes itself as it happens. Derrida names this pure, self-constituting movement "différance."¹¹ The play of différance also underlies how language works: it is différance that makes possible the constitution of signifiers and signifieds, in the Saussurean sense I sketched above, of language as a system of signs governed by its own internal dynamics and necessities. Derrida gives this différance two aspects, differing and deferring, which are also, at once, temporization and spacing.¹² Turning back to Beckett's play, without losing ourselves in technical language, we can say that it is this play of différance that makes the play itself possible. Waiting for Godot, being both a temporal and spatial act, since 'waiting' holds both within it, is made possible by these two aspects together. The deferring aspect, by postponing Godot's arrival, gathers the differing elements, the characters and the relations among them, and holds them within a further play of differing and deferring: the very movement that drives the work forward.

Another notable moment is Lucky's thinking. His capacity to think is offered as a service to Vladimir and Estragon, who had been "civil" to Pozzo, a kind of entertainment repaid for their good company.¹³ Thinking is not the sort of service classically expected of a slave. There is even a familiar cliché at work here, the image of the rich philosopher who does nothing but think while servants or slaves carry out every physical task. Lucky's thinking, and Pozzo's evident admiration for it, though he insists it was once a finer performance, back when Lucky learned a great deal from his own thought, forces us to reconsider this settled opinion about the relation between thinking and social status. There is no necessary link between one's capacity to think and one's social circumstances. Favourable conditions may ease the beginning of thought, by granting more time to attend to its stream, but no external circumstance can wholly grant or withhold this capacity, since it is transcendental in nature and cannot be made a condition of possibility for thinking. That Vladimir is so astonished to learn Lucky can think exposes this cliché for what it is, since Vladimir speaks here for the established doxa: under unfavourable circumstances, thinking seems almost miraculous. But circumstances that are constantly favourable can only be dreamed of, never lived. As Blanchot says of Kafka's case, "There are no favourable circumstances."¹⁴

Yet it is disputable whether Lucky's thinking deserves the name thinking at all. Rather than the questioning, reflection, attention, and argument that thinking properly involves, what we get is an endless flow of signifiers, one after another, with no discernible order. Within this chaotic soup, no single thought can be extracted that would make sense to an audience, which reveals, once again, the nature of language as a system of signs. Every such system has its own dynamics, necessities, and rules, and when these intrinsic rules are neglected, the process of signification, by which signifier and signified are drawn together, seizes up. As in Lucky's case, the whole flow collapses into meaninglessness.

Act two, which repeats the first to some degree, opens with Vladimir's song about a dead dog.¹⁵ Its repetitive structure, cycling through two verses, mirrors the cyclical nature of the play itself, which unfolds across two days that are at once consecutive and strangely discrete. After a while Estragon arrives, having been beaten once more. He is angry at Vladimir for having let him go, and the two fall again into their familiar dialogue of parting and going their separate ways. It is as though everything has reset since yesterday: each day, Vladimir and Estragon show a striking loss of memory for the one before. At one point, Estragon, speaking of Lucky, tells Vladimir "the best thing would be to kill me, like the other," but Vladimir does not follow him and asks twice, "what other?"¹⁶ Later, Vladimir notices that the tree now bears a few leaves absent the day before, while it is Estragon's turn to forget yesterday entirely: he tells Vladimir it must have been a dream that they were in this same place before.¹⁷ Pozzo, too, having gone blind in the second act, fails to recognize either of them. And since Lucky speaks only in the moment he thinks, we have no way into his memory at all. These recurring losses of memory, and the repetitions that accompany them, give the impression that the characters do not move through time in a linear way, but live it instead as a collection of discrete instances of the same moment, unconnected, or connected only by a thread that seems unnecessary. Later still, when Estragon and Vladimir hear sounds after their game with Lucky and Pozzo has ended, they take it for Godot's arrival. Vladimir grows genuinely excited: "Now it's over. It's already tomorrow. ... Time flows again already. The sun will set, the moon will rise, and we away ... from here."¹⁸ This outburst confirms, in fact, that they remain caught in a single moment endlessly reproducing itself, a moment marked by Godot's unfortunate absence, rather than moving within any real stream of time.

Silence, too, I think, plays its own role in the play. Vladimir and Estragon will try almost anything to avoid it, unable to bear it for long. Short silences they manage well enough with chit-chat, but longer ones leave them visibly unnerved. After the dialogue about the voices of the dead, for instance, Vladimir grows angry and shouts at Estragon, "Say something!"¹⁹ Estragon insists he was already trying, and, failing to find the words, asks Vladimir to sing instead. Each silence reminds them of Godot's absence, and each time that absence is felt, it sets off another small, futile effort to hold the coming silence at bay, until Godot's non-arrival is finally confirmed by the messenger boys who close each act. In my reading, these silences are how Godot actually shows up in the play: absent as he is said to be, he enters through these very silences rather than through the messengers he sends.

At one point, Pozzo and Lucky collapse together in a heap, and Estragon and Vladimir debate whether to help them up. Their differing readings of the situation say much about their characters. Seeing Pozzo and Lucky on the ground, Pozzo calling for help, Estragon considers helping only if there might be another chicken bone in it for him.²⁰ He seems, for a moment, to resist this opportunistic thought, yet we soon see Vladimir treating the situation just as opportunistically, as a chance to pass the time, to be entertained. Throughout the play, Estragon tends to represent the more naive half of the pair, usually led by Vladimir's suggestions. He shows little of the contemplative or reflective, occupying himself instead with the daily matters of the body: eating, his feet, where to spend the night. Vladimir, though nearly the same age, comes across as more intelligent and experienced, generally preoccupied with temporal matters, how to pass the time, what to do while waiting for Godot, aware, more often than not, that they are doing nothing at all. Yet their frequent lapses of short-term memory keep them from ever grasping the whole picture: that they stand in the midst of nothingness not temporarily, but constantly. They fear, too, that Godot would punish them if they stopped waiting. At the play's end, after the second messenger boy, brother to the first, arrives to say that Godot will not come that night either, Estragon asks, "and if we dropped him?" Vladimir answers, "He'd punish us."²¹

Why exactly Godot would punish them is far from certain, since they have nothing to offer him; if anything, it is Estragon and Vladimir who wait on something from Godot, not the reverse. Nothing in the play is certain: it is governed, throughout, by a radical uncertainty, one reinforced and reproduced by the short-term memory lapses of every character except Lucky, whose memory remains closed to us, and by the play's non-linear, momentary sense of time. Given all this, the play is a genuinely fascinating piece, since it is true, at once, that nothing happens in it at all, and that there is a great deal to ponder. In the midst of its absurdity, and this play can rightly be called absurdist, Waiting for Godot proves remarkably rich in philosophical implications, which I have tried to draw out above without reducing the play to any single theoretical frame. For the play already says a great deal on its own, and a work this strong has little need of philosophical or theoretical translation.

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NOTES

1. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber, 2006; pp. 11–88.

2. Ibid. (p. 12)

3. Ibid. (p. 13)

4. Ibid., (p. 20)

5. Ibid., (p. 20)

6. Ibid., (p. 22)

7. Ferdinand de Saussure, selections from Course on General Linguistics, tr. Wade Baskin. London: Fontana, 1981; (p. 112)

8. Ibid., (p. 32)

9. Ibid., (p. 33)

10. Ibid., (p. 37)

11. Jacques Derrida, "Différance" in Margins of Philosophy, tr. Alan Bass. New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982; pp. 3–27.

12. "Différance", (p. 8)

13. "Waiting for Godot", (p. 38)

14. Maurice Blanchot, "Kafka and the Work's Demand", in The Space of Literature, tr. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989; (p. 60)

15. "Waiting for Godot", (p. 52)

16. Ibid., (p. 58)

17. Ibid., (p. 61)

18. Ibid., (p. 72)

19. Ibid., (p. 59)

20. Ibid., (p. 73)

21. Ibid., (p. 87)

REFERENCES

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber, 2006; pp. 11–88.

Ferdinand de Saussure, selections from Course on General Linguistics, tr. Wade Baskin. London: Fontana, 1981.

Jacques Derrida, "Différance" in Margins of Philosophy, tr. Alan Bass. New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982; pp. 3–27.

Maurice Blanchot, "Kafka and the Work's Demand", in The Space of Literature, tr. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989; pp. 57–83.