Godots arrivent: More morality plays for our times

Abstract

Abstract This article looks at two sequels to Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot: Alan Titley’s Tagann Godot (Godot Arrives) (1991), originally written in Irish, and Daniel Curzon’s Godot Arrives (2002), written in English. Although Curzon knew nothing about the earlier work of Titley, the article traces numerous stylistic and thematic similarities between the sequels and attempts to explain those similarities by drawing on the concept of carnivalized literature as elucidated by Mikhail Bakhtin. Both works are read as morality plays attacking a contemporary consumerist culture and the article concludes with an argument for Bakhtinian carnival as a particularly apt framework for analysing many other fictional critiques of modern consumerism.