Adithya Pavithran

British Prose and Drama

DR. Rafseena M

14 November 2022

Language in Waiting for Godot

Waiting for Godot is a tragicomedy in two acts written by Irish playwright Samuel

Beckett and originally staged in 1953. Waiting for Godot was a real breakthrough in drama and

the first theatrical hit for the Theatre of the Absurd. The play is made up of discussions between

Vladimir and Estragon as they wait for the enigmatic Godot, who constantly sends word that he

will come but never does. They meet Lucky and Pozzo, talk about their problems and their lot in

life and contemplate suicide, and yet they wait. Vladimir and Estragon are a couple of human

beings who do not know why they were created on earth; they make the flimsy assumption that

there must be some meaning to their existence, and they seek enlightenment from Godot. They

gain a type of dignity that allows them to soar above their worthless existence because they hold

out hope for meaning and direction. Equally important is the language of the play which unfolds

the real inner and outer narration. Language is frequently dislocated, consisting of clichés, puns,

repetitions, and nonsequiturs. The absurd, pointless behavior and dialogue give the plays a

sometimes brilliant humorous veneer, yet there is an underlying serious theme of spiritual

sorrow. This displays the impact of humorous heritage taken from sources such as commedia

dell'arte, vaudeville, and music hall coupled with theatre skills such as mime and acrobatics. At
the same time, the influence of concepts represented by the Surrealist, Existentialist, and

Expressionist schools, as well as Franz Kafka's writings, is visible. Here we will be focusing in

detail on the language of the play.

Beckett's work is defined by the realization that words are incapable of describing the

inner self, as well as the admission that language is essential to the human predicament and

hence not a detachable component. Beckett sees language as fundamental to self-identity, and his

sorrow for the human predicament, as well as the force of his work, are based on this notion.

Despair, since the sett can only be approached asymptotically and represented, words traveling in

an orbit without ever attaining the center, the essence, power, because he views the fight of

language to achieve expression as the self's effort to create its own identity. His stance toward

language is therefore a paradoxical acceptance of self-refutation as a prerequisite for any artistic

endeavor; an acknowledgment of words' intrinsic incapacity to correspond to anything other than

themselves, as well as the possibility of expressing this very failure to communicate. What

Beckett is most aware of is the dialectical link between the thing to be expressed (theme, subject

matter) and the technique of articulation (a form of language, style) Regarding the latter as

fundamental to the former, he emphasizes the humorous ridiculousness of their fragmentation

into two non-interacting pieces, while sustaining the dialectic through the overall theatrical

structure.

To a considerable part, traditional Western philosophy has been focused on attempts to

develop a concept of congruence between the Cosmos and Logos. Truth has been equated with

WHAT IS, that is, existence as attested by the senses; in this tradition, WHAT IS NOT cannot be

stated since it is non-recognizable and unexplorable within the paradigm. The tradition that

prioritizes language as its primary priority To this sense, linguist Ferdinand de Saussure's work
can aid us in comprehending the dynamics of Beckett's work. He characterized language at the

beginning of the twentieth century as a system of differences in which a sequence of binary

oppositions supports the verbal system, with the most essential ones being those between

presence and absence and positive and negative.

Beckett incorporates these precise binary oppositions into the framework of Waiting for

Godot. In the Saussurean system, Didi and Gogo are opposed to Godot in the same way that

presence is opposed to absence. In keeping with our expectations, Beckett addresses the structure

and operation of language at both the dramatic speech and dramatic form levels, employing the

Saussurean concept of presence and absence as a metaphor for his more conventional, skeptical

perspective of perception. Didi and Gogo can only be certain of their own presence, of their own

existence, insofar as they can be seen. Beckett describes nature as a composite of perceiver and

perceived in the first of his Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. Waiting for Godot is

constructed on such a foundation. Didi feels lonely while Gogo sleeps since the perceiver (Gogo)

cannot tell if he is alive or not. As a result, Didi's violent outburst at the youngster in the second

act is justified. However, presence is always dependent on absence, and the latter satisfies the

former's existence since it is the fundamental ingredient that produces awareness. Such a

connection, Saussure might claim, is inherent in every language that opposes person to non-

person, the indication of an absence that can never incarnate itself as presence. Didi/Gogo is in a

dialectical connection with Godot and is unable to dissociate themselves since they are

referential to one another. The play is premised on this understanding either through direct

references to their relationship with him(Estragon: "We're not tied! Vladimir. But to whom. By

whom? Estragon: To your Ian) or by embedding awareness into the texture of their

conversation. In this latter case, words appear to transport people away from the agonizing
realization that they are dependent on Godot. Words allow people to recover from the awareness

of their difference from Godot at the time of speaking, but their feeling of difference cannot be

erased since it is inherent in the language they use, knitted into their very nature.

Godot dwells beyond space, free of temporal constraints. He exists in the tranquility of

Nothingness as an abstraction. He does nothing. Didi and Gogo lack these unique functionalities.

They still do something as they approach the zero point when they will overlap with the

opposing term: they wait, ponder, talk, and move. Didi and Gogo are palpable presences, clearly

'positive' when compared to Godot's zero point. The recurrence of the phrase "nothing" ("nothing

to be done," "nothing to show," etc.) expresses their wish to become nothing rather than their

actual predicament. Godot's coming would bridge the gap between desire and reality by making

the two poles synonymous: presence would be absent, and positive would be zero. Because

Godot does not appear, only language is left to express their deviation from the ideal absence-

negativity. The play's circular form represents the asymptotic and hopeless progress of the self

toward a condition of true being. This structure undermines the absolute world's fundamental

assumption that emptiness is synonymous with non-existence and so cannot be experienced. The

lonely movements of Didi and Gogo, their tautologous statements, and the long silences

compress what must have been left unsaid (given Beckett's ideas on language). The repeated use

of the phrase "We are waiting for Godor," which becomes equivalent to "We are waiting for

nothing," establishes absence as the fundamental elements essential to Didi and Gogo's state of

being. If, as Democritus puts it in one of Beckett's favorite quotes. Nothing is more real than

nothing, and it is thus impossible for man to make any affirmative declaration. When reality isn't

determined by time and isn't confined by physical limits, but instead exists in an endless duration

and an abstract space, words are unable to be certain about a meaning that must always evade
them. The absence of positive meaning, rather than the existence of a reality that is difficult or

impossible to explain verbally, forces language to engage in a process of self-repudiation. A term

like unhappy, for example, which unavoidably has a huge sentimental load, is too definite to be

rejected.

Estragon: I'd forgotten.

Vladimir: Extraordinary the tricks that memory plays!"

Each phrase in this short exchange eradicates the one before it. Their language is constructed on

a keen awareness of nothing. their acceptance of a fundamental negative that eliminates all

chance of perfect meaning. The stimulants of speech in Waiting for Godot are 'Silence' and

'Pause,' the precise factors that undercut the emotions to which the protagonists lay claim and

hinder them from inhabiting any definite region of commitment. Silence disrupts the flow of

speech and reveals meaning in its entirety. In Beckett's plays, the silences successfully 'frame the

language an audience may use in order to interpret them; the message is transmitted by the

spaces between sentences. In their quest for authenticity, Didi and Gogo aim to the point of

overlap, to the zero, to the point when all distinction is annihilated. It is a type of death want.

Inside their silences, the dead voices are heard talking of the past, of dreams and hopes, and

presence is once again equal to absence. Their words are a reflection of what they hear. describe

it, even criticize it, and However, absence is plainly part of their own language and is read aloud

to the audience. Silence serves the structural role of integrating the dialogue.
 The act of Pozzo appears to be a living personification of the "old school." He describes

the twilight in a poetic tone that cannot mask his profoundly positivist ideas. His speech is

peppered with ambiguous witticisms and words with a lingering poetical vibe (touch of autumn

in the air this evening, for example). This vocab has been expanded with a slew of synonyms that

have been jumbled together in order to find the 'correct one.' Thus, 'impress' is rejected in favor

of mollify,' which in turn is rejected in favor of 'cod,' allowing him to appropriately explain why

Lucky 'doesn't make himself cozy, in other words, why he suffers. Even suffering, according to

Pozzo, can be imputed to the victim's individual choice due to the distorting effects of reasoning.

Beckett shatters the idea that causality is a clear and 'objective' mental process by revealing the

foundation against which reasoning figures and illustrates the converse, namely that rational

discourse effectively distorts reality since it pretends to represent it. This is the repugnant face of

'the old style,' as expressed in nineteenth-century realism's theatrical rhetoric. Pozzo's wit, poetry,

and reason are all wiped out when he approaches zero degrees. However, as Vladimir and

Estragon have demonstrated, even this experience may be dynamic since it can lead to the

endeavor to articulate new definitions in novel ways.

To summarize, we can tell that Waiting for Godot kicks off the project that will drive all

of Beckett's later drama: to convey the search for self and meaning in terms of a dramatic

language that draws its strength from its own self-questioning, along with its 'duty to

communicate.' We confront 'the dynamism of the intermediate' at every level of the organization.

There are no set points of reference. We are stuck in the sphere of human existence from the

beginning, fluctuating between the extremes of differences, between existence and absence,

between self and other, simultaneously wishing for and dreading the apotheosis of nothingness.

According to Beckett's thoughts on the subject, as exemplified and dramatized in Waiting for
Godot, worth should be considered to exist not so much in any final outcome as in the process

itself.

Beckett's rejection of communication originates from his realization that ultimate

meaning is lacking in a universe that is, in and of itself, the absence of the absolute. Language-

as-communication becomes 'private' as a result of the lack of absolute external criteria to which it

can be compared, making it intrinsically self-referential. The reality, thus, cannot be portrayed

aesthetically, sometimes in the form of a dry account of physical traits. Beckett's argument that

the subject's experience of a specific object undermines the subject's relationship to the object by

changing the object into a simple intellectual pretext rule out experiential knowledge and the

legitimacy of experiential witness.

Velissariou, Aspasia. “Language in ‘Waiting for Godot.’” Journal of Beckett Studies, no. 8, 1982, pp.

45–57. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44782289. Accessed 14 Nov. 2022.