The endless wait for a rendezvous … for what, exactly? Time’s recurrence is marked by the moon and the sun. The present sits on the cusp of a hopeful future. Vladimir remembers, and Estragon forgets. Estragon’s shoes stink, while Vladimir adheres to a diet of garlic to ease the symptoms of his condition. These two are ill-starred but well-suited: Estragon’s feet are in constant pain, and Vladimir’s unspecified affliction induces frequent and painful urination. As they await their enigmatic patron, Godot, Estragon laments being beaten by nameless figures during the night, and Vladimir seeks to pass the time by stirring his companion into repartee.

Each act begins with the pair reunited after spending the night apart. Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait on the side of a country road. Vivian Mercier, the critic for the Irish Times, dubbed it “a play in which nothing happens, twice.” Beckett thus presents an eerie play that sits uneasily on the border between tragedy and comedy, in territory one can only call the absurd.Samuel Beckett originally subtitled his 1953 play Waiting for Godot “a tragicomedy in two acts”. If the world is meaningless, it makes no sense to see it as comic or tragic, good or bad.

The absurdity caused by the seeming mismatch between characters' tones and the content of their speech can be seen as a reaction to a world emptied of meaning and significance. In act one, Vladimir says, 'one daren't even laugh any more,' and his comment could apply well to the audience of Beckett's play, who don't know whether to laugh or to cringe at the events on-stage. All this has a discomforting effect on the audience, who is not sure how to react to this absurd mixture of comedy and tragedy, seriousness and playfulness. And Vladimir and Estragon talk nonchalantly and pleasantly about suicide. Estragon refers to 'billions of others,' who have been killed, and describes being beaten by an anonymous 'they.' Lucky (whose ill-fitting name is itself darkly comic) is treated horribly and physically abused on-stage. However, this humor is often uncomfortably mixed together with tragic or serious content to make a darker kind of comedy. All of this contributes to an absurdist humor throughout the play.

The play is filled with nonsensical lines, wordplay, meaningless dialogue, and characters who abruptly shift emotions and forget everything, ranging from their own identities to what happened yesterday.

Waiting for Godot is a prime example of what has come to be known as the theater of the absurd.

Waiting for godot book