Essays on Samuel Beckett

Question 1

The play “Waiting for Godot” functions with explicitly stipulated rules. The main characters in the play are Vladimir and Estragon. They are referred to as tramps in the play. The world in the play contains a lot of uncertainty. Nothing happens in the play, and there is always nothing to do. Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for a man referred to in the play as Godot. The tramps are uncertain about their actions. There are not sure they are waiting for Godot at the correct location and if it is on the right day. They are also unaware if ...

The chance to reinvent ourselves is one of the most compelling in the vast human experience. It is what compelled James Gatz to become Jay Gatsby, and to leave the life of a dirt farm family to own a series of ostensible pharmacies that sold illegal liquor out the back door, all so that he could win the love of Daisy and be everything that she wanted. It is what compels audiences to watch movies that show stories of change and transformation. Change can be complicated because it can end up leading to consequences that we did not expect, ...

Everything new is well-forgotten old. This saying is true concerning any aspect of culture. Humanity evolves together with civilization and each century, every decade brings new ideas, forms and notions. The movement of postmodernism brought a lot of artists, who tried to bring in music, theatre and literature something new. But very often their new creations just evoke some ideas from the cultural legacy of other artists – the characters, plots and themes repeat in different variations. The play “Endgame” written by Samuel Beckett – an Irish avant-garde theatre director, playwright, and novelist, one of the founders of the Theatre of ...

In Samuel Beckett’s Company, he uses variations of the word “devise,” “deviser,” “device,” and “devising.” In this paper the use of these words, which are used by Beckett with some frequency will be analyzed. The words will be analyzed as per their meaning, and in how “meaning” fit the contextual elements of Beckett’s text. The paper will be argued from an etymological perspective, to investigate whether words have different forms of meaning, and how Becket may be playing with the meaning of words. Although Beckett bombards the text with formations of the word “devise” in a seemingly absurdist ...

In Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days, he presents two characters who are married to each other. The wife, Winnie, chatters throughout the play, but the husband, Willie, generally speaks only in one-word answers. Their relationship seems to reflect a worn out marriage, in that neither of them seems to feel any passion for the other one. Their patterns of speech mirror their roles in the relationship. Winnie focuses on small, trivial things but unconvincingly claims that they are having happy times. Willie barely responds, and seems more of an object of Winnie’s attention than a real person. When ...