Waiting Is All

Abstract

POPULAR reviewers of Waiting for Godot echoed the verdict of that polished playwright, Jean Anouilh, that “Nothing happens,” and even the most perceptive critics have insisted upon the undramatic texture of the play. Eric Bentley, for example, finds no “situation in movement,” and Edith Kern entitles her article on Godot “Drama Stripped for Inaction.” In the play itself, Cogo complains, “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!” But close examination of the text reveals that, far from succumbing to the imitative fallacy-bore the audience to convince them of life's monotony-Beckett sets up a tension between surface stagnancy and dramatic development, a tension which gives rise to a major meaning of the tragicomedy.