文学结课论文
题目： Waiting and Hoping --Review of Waiting for Godot 等待和希望——等待戈多读后感 姓名： 学号：
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Waiting for Godot is not only a masterpiece by Samuel Beckett, but also a representative of the western absurd theater. The author demonstrates the absurdity of the world with absurdness. People express their hope in their absurdity and it is shown that hope is only cherished in the absurd behavior of waiting. At the same time, it is also reflected that people carry a line of hope for the absurd world, because it is the only hope to wait.
The process of waiting is painful. In a long time, two ragged vagrants named Estragon and Vladimir have been waiting for Godot, which was their ultimate goal of their lives. In the process of waiting, they had incoherent speech, repeated boring actions in order to change their hopeless waiting of every day life. All these behaviors shown the pain in this process and recorded postwar people’s anxiety, desire, panic. The reason of waiting is hope. The two haggard vagrants lived for Godot’s coming to change everything. The messenger of Godot, a little boy’s emergence cheered them up and gave them hope that Godot might come the next day. In the process of waiting, they constantly recalled nice things to make them full of confidence for the future, such as Eiffel Tower, the Bible and so forth. To spend the dull time, they did ridiculous games one after another except hanging themselves just because they kept Godot and hope in their mind and looked forward to a new life.
“Until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,--'Wait and hope.'”[1] This is the famous sentence from the last chapter of The Count of Monte Cristo. We can find that Alexandre Dumas suggested us a truth of life. To wait, do not rush into the irrational
emotion and indulge ourselves in the instinct of human nature and to hope, as the misery would be gone and we haven’t experience the best that life has to offer. Here he showed us a positive perspective of life: we are waiting for hope and finally we can get salvation. While in Waiting for Godot, its core also is wait and hope but the author is comparatively more negative because of the lack of hope and the frustrations that fill the dialogue. Waiting for Godot is depressing and inexplicable for it’s a story about random oppression, brutality, and dreams deferred by harsh realities.
"Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!"[2]That phrase, said by one of the main characters of the play, somehow sums up the whole plot of this short tragicomedy in two acts. The play starts with two men, Vladimir and Estragon, sitting on a lonely road. They are both waiting for Godot. They don't know why they are waiting for him, but they think that his arrival will change things for the better. The problem is that he doesn't come, although a kid does so and says Godot will eventually arrive. Pozzo and his servant Lucky, two other characters that pass by while our protagonists are waiting for Godot, and add another bizarre touch to an already surreal story, in which nothing seems to happen and discussions between the characters don't make much sense. Nevertheless, maybe that is exactly the point that the author wanted to make. He was one of the most accomplished exponents of the "Theatre of the Absurd", that wanted to highlight the lack of purpose and meaning in an universe without God.
Not everyone has a God, but who doesn't have a Godot? Does Godot, the person that Vladimir and Estragon endlessly wait, symbolize God? According to
Beckett, when hard-pressed to answer that question, "If I knew who Godot was, I would have said so in the play."[3]Whether Pozzo is Godot? According to the answer that Beckett to Colin Duckworth, he isn’t.[4] Is Godot hope? It’s hard to identify. So we don't know. The result is a highly unusual play that poses many questions, but doesn't answer them. I think Godot here is not a real person. He is the symbolism of hope and belief. In the play, Vladimir and Estragon waited for Godot everyday and they will still wait for him all their life, with disquietude and expectation, from which I can only see the void of life, but may be it is the real life. From my point of view, it is what Samuel Beckett wanted to show to the public. Human beings’ life is based on endless wait, which is always full of desperation, uncertainty, and perturbation; meanwhile we can just see a slight light of hope which is hard to reach. From a philosophic view, there are certain fundamental questions that every human being must come to terms with if they are to take their subjective existences seriously and with intrinsic value. Questions such as death, the meaning of human existence and the place of (or lack of) God in that existence are among them. By and large, the theories of existentialism assert that conscious reality is very complex and without an "objective" or universally known value: the individual must create value by affirming it and living it, not by simply talking about it or philosophize it in the mind. The play may be seen to touch on all of these issues. Existentialism means that existence precedes essence. So, your essence (who you are, what you think, and how you choose to interact with others and the world) is created manifested after you exist. You are not predetermined (aside from genetic predispositions, etc.). Your essence is your
creation. There is great freedom there, but also great responsibility and with that responsibility, there can be anxiety because the choices you make manifest that essence, or meaning in life. In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon (and the audience) are duped, thinking that the climax, epiphany, or any significant meaning will come when Godot arrives. To the contrary, the meaning is the interaction of the characters as they wait. They are waiting for someone or some sign to give some message; when, existentially speaking, it is the waiting - from birth to death - that is life itself. The existentialist would treat the waiting as the significance and meaning in life: the degree and profundity of that meaning is up to each individual. Vladimir and Estragon are waiting, even clinging to an idea of something more; instead, they should be Godot: in other words, they should take responsibility for their own happiness. So we are the master of our life, and we should control our life by ourselves not just wait for somebody else to help. Life is filled with wait, but we must wait to go. Each of us is the Godot of ourselves.
Beckett's achievement comes from his ability to link such nihilistic sentiments to extremely comic moments, and it is the humor that carries the reader or the theatergoer through what would otherwise be an unbearably cynical play. These lines of the play have become representative of modern man's ambivalence towards a cruel and uncaring world, which will always remind the people of the question whether you are waiting for Godot who is always there in your life.
From the Waiting for Godot , we can find that the human beings just look for the evidence and meaning of life through the painful waiting. As long as people wait, they
can have hope. This is exactly what this drama offers us——enlightment and fascination that make it an ever- lasting drama.So don’t wait for Godot, because you have already met him!
WORKS CITED
Conn: Greenwood Press, 1998.
[2]Baldick, Chris. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003.
[4]蓝仁哲. “感受荒诞人生 见证反戏剧手法—《等待戈多》剧中人及其处境.” 国文学评论. 3 (2004): 74-80.