From Minimalism to the Absurd: “The Intent of Undoing” in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

Abstract

Waiting for Godot ushered in an era of Absurd drama that drew on not only modern thought about life but also the modern image of life. Samuel Beckett, unlike Sartre and Camus as playwrights, stripped the façade of the modern existence and laid bare the scene with the minimum in its real image. To project such a stark condition of human experience Beckett chose to present us the maximum with “mere-most minimum.” The message in Godot appears to be existentialist, which Beckett denied, for he asserted that if ever he read philosophy it was Descartes, who gave the dictum ‘cogito ergo sum,’ or “I think therefore I am,” something that reflects a positive undertone of the play. Minimalism of form and content thus becomes the vehicle of the Absurd in Waiting for Godot. Beckett becomes the pioneer of the minimalist art in modern drama and champions ‘linguistic gravity’ without any traditional structure of plot. There are series of incidents but they don’t amount to anything and even incidence maybe too big a word. The characters sort of improvise in order to fill the time. The dialogue is repetitious, illogical and nonsensical; the characterisation is sketchy and inconsistent. Although theatre is the most concrete literary form available, when you see Waiting for Godot you are definitely seeing a set that consists of a tree and a road and you see five actors impersonating five people. That much is concrete. But no fact or relationship about that place or those people is ever certain. All is questioned and all is in flux. Beckett is not presenting an argument toward the conclusion of existential absurdity. He is presenting images of absurdity.