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.