![]() ![]() ![]() Unable to get it off, he gives up and announces "Nothing to be done." Vladimir, wincingly wandering onto the stage and grasping at his crotch (precious few readers and actors for that matter seem to grasp that one of the play's running jokes is Vladimir's venereal disease, which causes him immense pain when urinating), thinks Estragon is commenting on his own ailment, and announces, "I'm beginning to come round to that conclusion myself. Take the infamous opening: Estragon, the first of the tramps, struggles to pull off his boot to relieve his swollen foot. Why? Because as Benjamin Kunkel pointed out in a piece in The New Yorker not so long ago, "ot everyone has a God, but who doesn't have a Godot?" Beyond the metaphysical implications of the play, though, it's popularity stems from its near-perfection: for all the philosophical meaning people see in it, the action progresses with virtually no direct reference to it, and every line which seems to suggests some sort of grand significance has a very concrete meaning in the action. It has been performed as an allegory of apartheid South African, the Jim Crow South, the horror of the war in Bosnia and about every other possible situation imaginable. Rather, what makes Waiting for Godot so compelling is its wide applicability: it's a story about random oppression, brutality, and dreams deferred by harsh realities. ![]() But the play's power doesn't really come from that. Is Godot God? Are Didi and Gogo heroes for their seemingly indefatiguable faith he will arrive, or fools for hinging all their hopes and dreams on a man who never seems to arrive to help alleviate their suffering? Waiting for Godot, in proper Modernist fashion, strips away all the layers of narrative and form and leaves nothing but the naked husk of a play, which Beckett no doubt felt revealed the human condition at its most basic. Samuel Beckett's play seems to endlessly perplex reviewers: they want to see in it concrete associations that it generally denies them. ![]()
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