Motif of Waiting in Literary Provenances of Samuel Beckett and Han Kang

 

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett portrays the dismay and hollowness that most of the people suffer in the modern world. It is important to properly examine the characters and symbols of this play to understand the message Samuel Beckett conveyed through this work. In literary terms symbols stand for actions, objects or events that have a deeper meaning in the context of the whole story. Waiting for Godot illustrates a good number of symbols such as the tree, the boots, the rope, the hat etc. It needs to be noted that waiting itself is a meaningful symbol in Waiting for Godot. Life is all about waiting for people and occasions which bear valuable meanings to us. Life cannot be defined without the sense of waiting.

 In Waiting for Godot, the character Godot finally does not arrive. Thus it shows that people wait for a lot of things in life which do not happen or do not exist at the end of the day. In this way Samuel Beckett depicted the illusions that people run after or wait for in Waiting for Godot. Godot is a symbolic figure too who does not appear in the drama. The waiting by Vladimir and Estragon seems fruitless like the fascinations that most of the people hold in their minds which do not come true. A strong theme of nothingness is thus remarkably found in Waiting for Godot. This is an implication that life sometimes puts us in front of particular episodes which have existential dichotomy.

Godot remains unknown to the readers or viewers throughout the play. This article is an effort to examine the roles played by symbols presented in this drama. Symbols are repeatedly found in literary works. Therefore, it is vital to evaluate this play from a symbolic point of view. By understanding the meanings of symbols readers can better work out various dimensions of Waiting for Godot.

Vladimir and Estragon are two major characters in this play. They speak to each other in the play in the form of dialogues which reflect their eagerness and impatience to meet Godot. Questions often arise in the minds of readers about the fact that what or who is Godot because Godot cannot be seen in the drama physically. Waiting for Godot is widely known as an absurd drama for the vagueness that encloses Godot throughout the play.

According to MH Abrams’ A Glossary of Literary Terms, absurd literature means the presentation of unusual, unrealistic and puzzling occurrences or people in prose, poetry and plays. Waiting for Godot comes under the umbrella of an absurd play because the waiting scenes showing Vladimir and Estragon cannot be easily clarified. It is difficult to learn what they are waiting for or who they are waiting to meet. It cannot be easily explained for what reasons Godot’s arrival is necessary for Vladimir and Estragon. It cannot be even exactly said for sure what would happen if Godot arrived. This article is an initiative to look for answers to these questions by going through the play attentively and analysing its characters, events and objects for this purpose.

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot actually deserves a much longer and deeper analysis for a thorough understanding of the play. It has been understood from the endeavors to prepare this article that Waiting for Godot is in fact a lifelike drama though it contains a broad number of characteristics of absurd literature. To write from a wider angle of vision, the word absurd is not just confined within the parameters of literature. Life itself turns out to be a monotonous, distasteful and absurd phenomenon when pain, hopelessness, uncertainty and failures devastate human beings.

South Korean author Han Kang won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2024. Her masterpieces include The White Book, Human Acts, Greek Lessons and The Vegetarian. A few lines on waiting can be quoted from Han Kang’s The White Book “I’m waiting. No one is going to come, but still I wait. No one even knows I’m here, but I’m waiting all the same.” So, the theme of waiting has stood the test of time all the way from Irish playwright Samuel Beckett to South Korean novelist Han Kang. Samuel Beckett was awarded Nobel Prize for literature in 1969 while Han Kang, who is now 53 years old, won Nobel Prize for literature this year.

In Human Acts, we find a devastated woman whose husband was killed in an operation by the law and order forces during a mass uprising in South Korea in 1980. The woman moves around the offices of the law enforcement agencies to get back her deceased husband’s corpse but she fails. Han Kang expressed the woman’s traumatic mental state in the following words “I could not hold your funeral when you died. And so my whole life has become a funeral.” The allusion to funeral hits us hard in these lines and this gets us very close to the crackdown that was hammered on the demonstrators of Bangladesh during the Great July Revolution where over one thousand revolutionaries got killed by the law and order forces.

The Gwangju Massacre is central to Han’s magnum opus, Human Acts—a harrowing and clear-eyed yet somehow tender look at the weeks-long uprising against Chun that began on May 18, 1980, resulting in exorbitant death and enduring collective trauma. The novel also means a great deal to me personally: For as long as I can remember, my mother, who is four years older than Han, has resisted thinking about life under Chun in the 1980s, so much so that she avoids TV shows and movies set in that decade. She does not refuse to talk about it per se, but over the years I have gathered that discussing it causes her pain, so I prefer waiting for her to volunteer information rather than asking her for it. Once, we were wandering the campus of her alma mater in Seoul when she looked up at a building and remarked that her classmates set themselves on fire and jumped off the roof as a form of protest. And then, I fill the gaps in my knowledge with books. All the victims of the Gwangju carnage could not be identified. Their loved ones have been still waiting for them to return. Thus Han Kang, like Samuel Beckett, has eternalized the theme of waiting in her literary creations.

All the characters in Waiting for Godot are inconclusive figures. It cannot be exactly determined what the ultimate goal of these people is. We cannot say for sure what sort of relationship is there between Godot, Vladimir and Estragon. Despite the fact that the connection between these three major characters in the play is not at all lucid, still Vladimir and Estragon continue to wait for Godot fruitlessly.

Disappointment, fatigue, sufferings, anomalies and amorphousness are part of everyone’s life on or off the stage. This is one of the principal dimensions Waiting for Godot consists of.

Since the title of this article includes symbols, it is necessary to add that the symbols which are found in this play and which are interpreted in this feature work as the playwright’s vehicles to deliver the focal essence of the drama to its viewers and readers. The more we realize the inner meanings of these symbols, the more the sum and substance of Waiting for Godot become clearer to us. The nothingness of life in the modern world, the spread of despondency and human beings’ endless desire to survive in the middle of these negative aspects constitute the theme and plot of Waiting for Godot.

Literature is always evaluated in terms of philosophy. A number of social and philosophical interpretations of the play are possible. For this reason Waiting for Godot is often judged in light of existential thoughts. A flavor of skepticism also prevails throughout the play regarding the arrival of Godot. Doubts, worries, confusion cannot be isolated from life. Samuel Beckett leads the readers and viewers to this realization through the events and characters in this play.

By means of the absurdities of the play, Samuel Beckett’s paradoxical approach to reality becomes exposed to the readers. First it is important to understand the meaning of paradox. According to A Glossary of Literary Terms by MH Abrams, “A paradox is a statement which seems on its face to be logically contradictory or absurd, yet turns out to be interpretable in a way that makes good sense.”

The concept of waiting is a paradox by itself in this drama. Throughout the entire play Vladimir and Estragon continue to wait for Godot who does not appear at all. So, the title of the play Waiting for Godot is a paradoxical one. Vladimir and Estragon wait for someone who perhaps does not exist or maybe Godot exists but he simply did not arrive. So, the belief by Vladimir and Estragon that Godot would arrive is fully paradoxical to the fact that Godot is not seen on stage in any part of the drama. Waiting for Godot illustrates the point that Vladimir and Estragon cannot break through the barren cycle of waiting but still they wait.

Reality is filled with paradoxes. People believe in one thing but they do something quite different. People hope for one thing but they finally receive something opposite.

Paradox is broadly found in the sufferings of the characters in this play. The philosophical concept of the nature of suffering is first introduced here by the paradoxical or contrasting physical ailments of each character. Estragon has sore feet which hurt him, and Vladimir has some type of painful urinary infection which causes him to suffer. One character hurts and the other one suffers. Ultimately the physical disabilities characterize the two men and also symbolize the various other drawbacks of these two fellows. The greatest disability of Vladimir and Estragon is not being able to stop waiting for Godot. This sort of disability handicaps almost all human beings in one way or another.

Estragon has not taken his boots off, and he looks inside it to see what was causing the difficulty. Vladimir then scolds Estragon for one of man's most common faults: blaming one's boots for the faults of one's feet. This accusation, of course, refers to the tendency of all of human race to blame any external thing — boots, society, circumstances etcetera — for impediments in one's own nature. It is easier for Estragon to blame the boots for his aching feet than to blame his own feet.

As the play Waiting for Godot comes to an end, it leaves some unanswered questions like whether Vladimir and Estragon would keep on waiting all their life and whether there is someone really called Godot. This is an implication of the complex riddles that sometimes make life difficult to understand. All things that people do in their life cannot be explained through reasons. The irrationality of life is therefore another important thing which has been sketched by Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot.


Mahfuz Ul Hasib Chowdhury
is a contributor to different
English newspapers
and magazines.