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            I find it very interesting that all of the works that we’ve read connect to the time period that they were written in, and this one is no exception. While I found this play frustrating at times to read I also thought it was very amusing. Obviously the cause of this is the absurdism within this play. This play expresses absurdism in various ways from expressing the theme that life has no meaning or significance to employing circular and highly repetitive plots.

            The play starts with our two characters Vladimir and Estragon waiting Godot. They come the first day and wait for him with no luck and come the second day to do the same. They never state their purpose of waiting for this mysterious figure but instead they converse, essentially about nothing. In one conversation Vladimir starts, “Charming evening we’re having/Unforgettable/And it’s not over/ Apparently not/ It’s only the beginning/ it’s awful/ Worse than the pantomime/the circus/ The music-hall/ The Circus” (1.486-495). This lack of purpose expresses the idea that life has no meaning or significance. Neither Vladimir nor Estragon have anything of importance to do so they wait around for a man to maybe appear.  The plot is also very repetitive as they do the same thing the next day. The men come together, have mundane conversations, and wait for a man to appear who never does.  By creating two character’s with no purpose, Beckett is able to incorporate the idea of absurdism into his work.

My questions are:

Is there ever a time in this poem that you disagree with my statement and if so where is it.

Also why do you think that Beckett chose to incorporate absurdism into his work, what is it's purpose?

The Meaning Behind the Gloominess

     While I was reading Waiting for Godot, I noticed myself dozing off and becoming frustrated waiting for something to happen in the story. Nothing ever did and Godot never showed up. This feeling of being tired of the same thing, wanted to end the misery of Estragon and Vladimir, and the feeling of time looping around the same subject is exactly how Estragon and Bladimir felt while in the story.
     The purpose of the looping text and boring dialogue is to put us in the shoes of the main characters. They were supposedly in Hell and reading this 55 pages of boring nothingness was a version of our own Hell. This could just be the author's interpretation of what waiting to be saved from Hell feels like. Though no one will ever live to tell how it really happens, the author used his own imagination and brought us as close to how it will be as possible. Although it was boring and nothing ended up happening, the author was genius in writing this because it really makes you stop and think about what Hell feels like without being a bloody, violent Hell.
     Though there isn't much to discuss plot-wise in this story, the gloominess is what is the most important part to the message of the story.
     Questions:
1. I would like to know if my take on the story is accurate and Godot is said to be a God creature?
2. If plot has some significant point to it, what would it be?

WFG 4

There are many biblical references in this text, one that I found particularly interesting was when they refer to Pozzo as both Abel and Cain as he is writhing on the ground. I think that this goes along with the absurdist principles that we have discussed in class. In the story of Cain and Abel, they are the two sons of Adam and Eve, and Cain kills abel per God’s request. One of the qualities of absurdism is that there are contradictions. By calling Pozzo Cain and having him respond with, “help,” (1403) and getting the same response when calling him Abel tells us a lot about the nature of the setting. Cain was the first human born, and Abel was the first human to die, creating a contradiction by calling him both names. By being both Cain and Abel, it is hard to place an identity on Pozzo, is he a killer, or is he the one being killed? This further emphasizes the hopelessness of the setting, you don’t really have an identity you can attatch yourself, you merely latch on to any identity as the cycle continues. Does Pozzo seem more like Cain or Abel? Is he a victim or is he the one with the knife?

WFG 3

While waiting is what seems to be a Hellish nightmare, Estragon asks a very interesting question, “Do you think God sees me?” (1398). He then pleas to God, “Have pity on me!” (1399). After this,  they think that Godot is coming with Pozzo, and they have hope. They are convinced that the man they have been waiting hours, days, or maybe eternities for has finally arrived. This hope comes right after Estragon cries out for God’s help. This reinforces the idea that they are in hell because when you ask for God and need him the most, you can get a little sense of hope, but it is struck down. This is exactly what happens to our main characters, they realize that they’re job of waiting for Godot has to continue further.

Is God the reason that they have a short sense of hope in a hopeless environment? Is continued worship of God a way to break the absurdist change? I think this might be true because Vladimir says, “Time flows again already,”(1399). One of the biggest characteristics of absurdism is that there is no sense of time. Even the characters noticed a lack of time, or that there was no difference in time. They think this hope has broken the time loop, but this idea is struck down when Godot does not show up.

WFG 2

As I suggested in my earlier blog post from this reading, Beckett makes very clear the absurdist qualities that the characters and the play as a whole possess. The continuous cycle is not the only obvious characteristic. The play also has instances where the main characters express very dark humor. One of the times is when Estragon and Vladimir are talking about the Macon country, and the landscape around them in Act II. Estragon says, “I’ve puked my puke of a life away here, I tell you! Here! In the Cackon country!” (1388). The footnotes tell us that he Beckett is punning on the French word “caca” which is a child’s way of saying excrements. Estragon is suggesting that they are in a fecal world, and while that sounds very funny, it is also very dark because they seemed to be trapped in a continuous circle where they can’t leave the soiled land.

Also, by saying that he, “puked my puke of a life away,” (1388) he is further emphasizing the idea that they are not only trapped, but they are also in hell, or a hell-like atmosphere. Maybe they died and this is what Hell is for them. Can they escape this or are they stuck here? Is there any hope for our characters at all?

Waiting For Godot 1

For this blog post, I want to focus on the first time that Vladimir and Estragon see each other in the second act. Their conversation starts off very hostile, Estragon yelling, “Don’t touch me...Don’t speak to me” (1386). This is not the way that they act when they first run in to each other in act I. In Act I they are glad to see each other, and act as if they hadn’t seen one another in a long time. While this interaction is not a positive one, it gives the reader hope that there could be a change up in the plot, and that something exciting will happen. With a conflict, you get more of a plot.

However, they almost immediately go back to the kind ways they expressed in their first interaction in Act I. All they needed to do was look at each other and then they hugged as the stage directions suggested. Then their conversation is very similar to the beginning of Act I, they’re “happy to be back” (1387) and that now they need to “wait for Godot” (1387). The plot is circular; it keeps repeating itself, a common absurdist characteristic. How do characters break this continuous cycle? We see there is some hope but is all hope lost for a break in the cycle?

Waiting For Godot/Hobbit Megapost

This blog will be in two full length parts concerning the last two things we read because I need to catch up.

I'll start with Waiting for Godot. There's quite a bit to be said about this work and postmodernist literature in general, but I'm going to focus on how the characters generally jive with the ethos of the time and how a lot of what the playwright talks about is becoming more and more relevant today.

One of the things I really latched onto in Waiting for Godot was the meaninglessness of communication. Vladimir and Estragon attempt to speak with each other, but it often seems that they're talking about two completely different things from disparate perspectives. Even when they do reach a mutual understanding, nothing they conclude ever seems to affect their condition. When their environment changes, Vlad and Estragon notice, but they never behave differently. It seems that Beckett understood something fundamental about the way humans interact with others - that individual conversations, from the words we utter to our intentions, are ultimately so similar to each other that they may as well be exactly the same. It's a difficult concept to put into words, but the ultimate point that Beckett makes is that nothing ever changes and there's "nothing to be done".

Beckett was very clever to see the trend towards impersonal interactions in his environment from telephone to television. As people are barraged with information from media, communication becomes more of an exercise in regurgitation. This trend continues to worsen to this day, causing further breakdown in meaning and significance to communication. Whether Waiting for Godot was a warning against this trend or simply an observation isn't really knowable, which might be how Beckett would want it.

Questions: Do you think Beckett thought it was possible to communicate in a meaningful way? If so, why have his characters be so helpless?

Now, moving on to The Hobbit. In a lot of ways, The Hobbit is the opposite of a postmodernist work. The universe in the book seems to have rules with an overbearing sense of consistency and clarity. Even the way the characters interact is governed by rules, rarely surprising the reader. It's always clear who the good guy is and the villains seem to genuinely believe that they're evil. To me, this is a reaction to the world that Tolkien lived in. In the time of the World Wars, it wasn't always clear who the bad guys were. Of course, that seems obvious to we who live in the age of the antihero, but at the time the idea that your country might not always be in the right was fairly novel.

Tolkien saw this stuff in person. He served in the infantry during WWI, losing many of his closest childhood and teenage friends in the trenches of France. As you would expect, this influenced his writing. He saw a world with no rules - a postmodern world - and rejected it. In place of the moral grey area that all of humanity inhabits, characters in his stories are either heroic stalwarts or villainous monsters. In place of the unfeeling industrialization of the modern world, mysterious magic inaccessible to the average hobbit saturated his books.