Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

1976

Thesis Director

Walter Lazenby

Abstract

This thesis examines one of the many paradoxes of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot--that although on the surface Beckett reduces his characters to the barest minimum in human terms, the spectator still finds himself, mysteriously, identifying with those pathetic stage creatures and their plights.

The dual purpose of this paper is to examine the methods Beckett used to foster this sense of spectator-character likeness and to assess its impact upon the spectator. It explores the contrast between the near-caricatures, Pozzo and Lucky, and the more complexly humanized Vladimir and Estragon. It discusses Beckett's universalization of character, time, place, and action in the play and his success in forcing the spectator to apply the universals to himself. And it examines the nature and effect of the plentiful humor, including the stage laughter.

Beckett presents his main characters as clown-bumbs, at best once-respectable men now reduced to seemingly pitiable circumstances. But he universalizes them in appearances, time, and place so as to make them representative of all men. At the same time he draws the spectator into association with them so that the spectator feels included in the general representation. The characters seem at first glance to be merely caricatures, exaggerated and bizarre in their appearances, actions, and responses; but Beckett fills his two main characters out with enough humanity to allow the spectator to develop sympathetic responses to them.

Stage laughter is rare in the play, but through it Beckett shows that the characters laugh in response to their own misery and the misery of others. In many of the comic sequences he also shows that the characters entertain themselves at the expense of others. However, he manipulates responses so that the spectator realizes that his own laughter and amusement, so curiously copious in response to a world wherein laughter is virtually prohibited, is as much laughter in the face of misery as is that of the characters; that the spectator's entertainment is as much rooted in someone else's misery as theirs is. The revelation that the spectator's responses are similar to those of the characters, coupled with the previous identification of spectator with character, forces the spectator to realize that when he continues to laugh at the ridiculous actions on stage, he is also laughing at himself. In the end the spectator is hung suspended between the urge to laugh and the simultaneous moral consciousness that laughter is somehow inappropriate. Like the characters he is trapped between the compulsion to act and the inability to bring anything off.

The result is that the spectator experiences the enlightenment that his own life, despite its complexities, is not very much grander than the existences in which the characters are trapped, and, perhaps more shockingly, that his own responses to life are not very much different than theirs or much more appropriate than theirs.

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