Waiting for Godot

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Waiting for Godot and The Critics Waiting for Godot has given rise to a lot of controversy. Critics have not been able to reach any kind of agreement about this play. Beckett himself did not offer much help to critics so far as their efforts to interpret the play were concerned. There have been plenty of both favourable and unfavourable commentaries on this work. The majority of commentators have been concerned with the religious problems suggested by the play, and many have offered an existential interpretation of it. One critic, for instance, urges a distinction between “nihilistic existentialism” and Christian existentialism, and asserts that the latter offers one of the essential keys to Beckett’s play. Kierkegaard has been pointed out as a shaping influence on Beckett. But most other critics who have acknowledged the existentialist in the play seem to favour the Sartrean interpretation. The vision of man in this play, it has been said, is similar to the Sartrean analysis of the “others”, namely the view that life is a perpetual series of rebounds, in which man is constantly thrown back into his solitude. Another critic, agreeing with this view, speaks of the “existentialist comedy”, in the play. Another critic observes: “Waiting for Godot exactly fulfils Sartre’s definition of an existentialist play as one which sets out to present the contemporary situation in its full horror so that the audience, finding it unendurable, may feel forced to remedy it.” The supposed existentialism in the play is somewhat qualified by a critic according to whom Beckett’s characters, unlike Sartre’s, are never “en situation.” This critic also introduces the word, “absurdity.” Two other critics, in their essay “To Wait or Not to Wait,” begin their discussion by defining the absurd in convincing detail and relating the notion to this play. This view is indebted to Martin Esslin’s
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