Processing....

"Waiting For Godot" may be one of the most unique plays I have ever read. I walked away not knowing how to describe it because of how little actually occured in the play. The characters conversed, they tried to entertain themselves, the encountered a few different people passing through and they called it a night when it became dark.

After doing some research on the play I found commentary bv Vivian Mercier, an Irish literary who was a student of Beckett’s work, and he said Beckett "... has achieved a theoretical impossibility—a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What's more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice." (Irish Times, 18 February 1956, p. 6.). This really is how I felt by the end of the play – nothing had happened yet I didn’t read the play completely aggravated. I did begin to wonder when I read the second act why everything was happening again, and by everything I mean nothing.

I begin to think how that first audience must have felt. I don’t know if I could have sat through the play either. I know many got up and left the first showing and how can you blame them. I thought that maybe I was missing the deeper meaning and I found that many people have many interpretations of the play. However, Becket himself said that people are making to much of it. I think he did intend for it to be simple, a minimalist play and it doesn’t necessarily have to mean the deepest of things. With that, I think Becket did throw some lines in the play that do have a significant meaning. He made quite a few Biblical references, he discussed suicide, and he used a lot of repetition. What the meaning is of all of these different lines – I don’t know. I’m looking forward to hearing more opinions.