Question 1

Who is Godot?

Accepted Answer

Beckett refused to explain who Godot is — he claimed not to know himself. The most obvious interpretation (that Godot = God) is supported by the play's religious imagery (waiting, salvation, judgment, the two thieves crucified with Christ that Vladimir discusses), but Beckett denied that this was the intended reading. The most productive approach is to treat Godot as genuinely indeterminate: what Godot represents changes with each production and each viewer, but the important thing is not who Godot is but what waiting for Godot does to Vladimir and Estragon — how it structures their time, their hope, and their relationship with each other. The play is about waiting, not about what is waited for.

Question 2

Why did Beckett write in French?

Accepted Answer

Beckett, who was Irish and had grown up speaking English, chose to write in French in the late 1940s because he felt that English — his native language — gave him too many resources, too many literary options, too much eloquence. French was for him a foreign language that forced simplicity, directness, and constraint; he had to strip away the elaborate literary English that his extensive reading had given him. The result is the austere, precise, highly controlled French of Godot and the trilogy, which Beckett then translated back into English — but an English that had been stripped and simplified by the passage through French. The bilingual nature of Beckett's work is essential to its aesthetic.

Question 3

What is the relationship between the two acts?

Accepted Answer

The two acts of En attendant Godot are almost identical in structure — Vladimir and Estragon wait, Pozzo and Lucky arrive, Pozzo and Lucky leave, a boy arrives with a message from Godot, the act ends. But everything has changed slightly: Lucky, who spoke a long monologue in the first act, is now silent; Pozzo, who was sighted, is now blind; the tree has leaves (it was bare in the first act). The changes are small enough to raise the question of whether they really happened, and large enough to suggest that time is passing — but the essential situation is unchanged. The repetition shows that the waiting will continue indefinitely; there is no escape from the structure of waiting.

Question 4

What is Lucky's monologue?

Accepted Answer

Lucky's monologue in Act One is the most sustained linguistic event in the play — a long, apparently random accumulation of phrases about God, man, science, sport, and the skull, which gradually disintegrates into pure sound and syllables before Lucky is silenced when Estragon grabs his hat. The monologue is both a demonstration of language at the limits of coherence (it seems to be saying something but never quite arrives at a statement) and a parody of academic discourse (it has the form of a logical argument but produces only noise). Beckett's genius was to show that even a sustained intellectual discourse, stripped of its social context, is only a series of sounds.

Question 5

What happened at the first production?

Accepted Answer

The first production, directed by Roger Blin at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris on January 5, 1953, was immediately recognized as a major theatrical event. The first-night audience included most of the Paris theatre world; reactions were divided between incomprehension and recognition. The critic Sylvain Zegel's review in La Libération called it 'perhaps the most important theatrical event since the war'; others were baffled. The production ran for over three hundred performances and transferred to other theatres; within a year, productions were opening across Europe and in the United States. The San Quentin Drama Workshop production (1957), performed for prisoners at San Quentin State Prison who identified with Vladimir and Estragon as people waiting for something that never comes, became legendary.

En attendant Godot Reading Order

Complete En attendant Godot Book List