I've just finished reading it and I'm trying to figure out what to make of it. What interpretations did you guys have?
You could spend a career writing about that play and still not be able to answer that question fully...but it's an amazing play, I've read it more times than I can count, and seen it performed a couple too...Beckett deserves his place as the greatest modern playwright, if not the greatest full stop.
i think you might want to ask a mod to move this thread to the appropriate section, since this one is for issues relating to members own writings...
Pretty much standard side of the road conversation if you were to ask me! Seriously, though, seems to me that he was just trying to induce an altered state in his audience (a mild one) by breaking the pattern of logical chit chat. Forcing mind expansion and enabling people to have a different point of view outside of the banal. Those kind of mind bending zen-like phrases can be heard every day in Ireland, though nowadays, not so much. A good example might be the way directions are given to to someone's house. "OK, come on down the main road, turn left a half mile before you get to the church. come up a bockity hill and when you get to the third turn on the right, ignore it and go down that road a ways until you see a cottage with a yellow door. We're in the second house past that, but I'll come down and meet you on the main road anyhow. Okay? see you at half four. (this means about quarter past five)" So that play wasn't all that much of a stretch for him..
In fact this drama is based on the idea of absurdity. In fact if we fathom the deepest recesses of the human mind all we come upon is a series of nonsenses and in fact though we try to connect meanings to our life and our thoughts it will end up with absurdity. I have read a number of critical reviews of this book and I got nowhere any meaning or any connotation surrounding this. Of course with him the writing of drama takes a turnaround. This was an experimental drama and it broke with the traditional concept using plot. This is therefrom modern the old dramatic technique takes a break and a new dramatic form takes form despite the fact that Ibsen had done something modern but Becket's dramatic form was iconoclastic something that lays foundation for modern an ultramodern dramatic experiment. With this playwright a breakthrough commences and that mirrors the absurdities ingrained in the human psyche notwithstanding the fact that we in our writing try give order.
I'd agree totally that it's rooted in the Theatre of the Absurd, but that doesn't imply that the text is meaningless. In fact, I'd argue that by rejecting traditional notions of plot and progress, Beckett is more free to explore aspects of the human condition, particularly things like memory and time, in a more direct way.
My favourite play, I was lucky enough to see it with Simon Callow, Patrick Stewart and the imperious Ian McKellen!!! Awesome. It's an existentialist play with a few ways to read it, my own being that it is a triumphalist assertion of the self in the face of chaos, the choosing of meaning where there is none, even where that meaning may have a misplaced object, in this case, Godot.
waiting for godot is a bit like the catch22 book. I have read it a long time ago and I did not think much of it. it is farcical in the sense that is pointless to read something knowing nothing is going to come out of.
