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Absurdity in Samuel Becketts "Waiting for Godot"

Author: Lea Lorena Jerns

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2014-06-05

Total Pages: 24

ISBN-13: 3656666016

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,0, Humboldt-University of Berlin (Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Innovative Twentieth-Century Theatre, language: English, abstract: In what way does Samuel Beckett create absurdity in his play "Waiting for Godot" and what is it that makes the “game” with the absurdity so unique and therefore Samuel Beckett’s play to one of the most authentic representatives of the "Theatre of the Absurd"? Samuel Beckett was born in 1906 in Dublin and died in 1989 in Paris. He was an Anglo-Irish author and wrote in French as well as in English. Furthermore, he wrote poems and novels and worked as a theatre director. Samuel Beckett is considered the master of absurdity. (cf. Schwanitz 323) The central theme in his works is the meaninglessness of the human existence. (cf. Wunderlich) He was friends with James Joyce and was impressed by Joyce’s “stream of consciousness” – a special literary method that James Joyce used. The idea of the “stream of consciousness” is an on-going process of associating things, i.e. the idea of getting inside into the uncontrolled process of thinking of a person. Waiting for Godot (1954) is Beckett’s translation of his own original French version that is called "En attendant Godot" (1952). In 1969 he received the Nobel Price for Literature, but he did not accept the price because people thought "Waiting for Godot" would be a potential religious play. According to Beckett that was wrong and that is why he decided to refuse the price. Finally, Samuel Beckett was the most unique, singular writer in English/French since 1945.

Waiting for Godot

Author: Samuel Beckett

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2011-04-12

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 9780802198822

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From an inauspicious beginning at the tiny Left Bank Theatre de Babylone in 1953, followed by bewilderment among American and British audiences, Waiting for Godot has become of the most important and enigmatic plays of the past fifty years and a cornerstone of twentieth-century drama. As Clive Barnes wrote, “Time catches up with genius … Waiting for Godot is one of the masterpieces of the century.” The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone—or something—named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree, inhabiting a drama spun of their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as mankind’s inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett’s language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existential post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time.

An Anatomy of Drama

Author: Martin Esslin

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 1977-12

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 0809005506

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Samuel Becket's "Waiting for Godot" and the Theater of the Absurd

Author: Stefanie Speri

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2015-05-12

Total Pages: 28

ISBN-13: 3656960135

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Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - History of Literature, Eras, grade: 1,3, Humboldt-University of Berlin (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: "Waiting for Godot" is not only one of the most famous works of Samuel Beckett; it is also one of the most popular creations of the genre of the Theater of the Absurd. Originally written in French, Beckett’s play was first performed in the Théâtre de Babylon in Paris in 1953 (cf. Beckett 128) and confronted its audience with the circumstance of the “nonappearance of the person awaited so faithfully by the two main protagonists”. (Astro 114) The spectator shares this experience of waiting for someone who might not come with the characters which made it possible for Beckett to give his audience an understanding of the intentions of the absurdist drama. Waiting for Godot is not only completely detached from the conventions of the classic drama, namely the unity of time, place and action, this unity is instead substituted by illogical actions, absurd scenarios and dialogues that appear to be linked randomly. By some viewers perceived as boring and even mindless (cf. Beckett, The Critical Heritage 98), for others it is a work of genius with a profound statement. But what makes the two-act play to seem pointless and boring at first glance? This paper intends to illustrate that Waiting for Godot – being an absurdist drama – is isolated from the classic drama and its conventions and deals with the structural elements Beckett used to convey the absurdity and illogicality that the play is based on. After explaining the term absurd and outlining the formation of the Theater of the Absurd the paper focusses on structural elements of the absurdist drama in general. A short summary of Waiting for Godot is followed by the analysis of the play, concentrating on the connection of form and content especially by discussing characters and their actions, the time and place and the dialogues and language.

The Omnipresent Emptiness in Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot"

Author: Saskia Bachner

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2008-08

Total Pages: 90

ISBN-13: 3640136977

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Bachelor Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,6, University of Mannheim, language: English, abstract: Incomprehension and confusion are common reactions to the plays of Samuel Beckett. The effort of the audience to extract an overall meaning from the plot mostly fails. This is due to the fact that on the stage, all concepts on which we usually rely collapse; they lose their meaning. Among them are for instance "the belief in God, in the unity of the world, [and] in the knowability of experience" (Connor, 3). The audience is no longer able to revert to familiar experiences in order to establish an interpretation. The result is inner emptiness. According to Beckett and the other writers of the so-called Theatre of the Absurd, inner emptiness is a basic experience of everyday life. Against the background of the events of the Second World War, they believe that our world is characterised by dissolution (cf. Esslin 1991, 43). The concepts in which we believe have merely become illusions. We cling to them in order to avoid the truth: we are left alone in an empty world. Beckett shares this opinion with several philosophical areas. Nevertheless, he is clearly no philosopher. Beckett himself emphasises that "he never understood the distinction between being and existence" (P. J. Murphy quoted in Barfield, 155). However, this does not seem to be entirely true since he includes these terms as well as the philosophical problem of the inner emptiness in his work. Yet, unlike Sartre and Camus, Beckett does not present a solution to this problem (cf. Cormier & Pallister, 3f). Nonetheless, Martin Esslin states that philosophical problems are in general better expressed by the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd than by the plays or novels of Sartre and Camus. In contrast to the latter, the Theatre of the Absurd does not only illustrate emptiness in the content of the plot, but also in the form of the play itse

Transformative Experience

Author: Laurie Ann Paul

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0198717954

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How should we make choices when we know so little about our futures? L.A. Paul argues that we must view life decisions as choices to make discoveries about the nature of experience. Her account of transformative experience holds that part of the value of living authentically is to experience our lives and preferences in whatever ways they evolve.

The Theatre of the Absurd

Author: Martin Esslin

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2009-04-02

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 0307548015

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In 1953, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents—Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others—shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their characters’ inability to understand one another. In 1961, Martin Esslin gave a name to the phenomenon in his groundbreaking study of these playwrights who dramatized the absurdity at the core of the human condition. Over four decades after its initial publication, Esslin’s landmark book has lost none of its freshness. The questions these dramatists raise about the struggle for meaning in a purposeless world are still as incisive and necessary today as they were when Beckett’s tramps first waited beneath a dying tree on a lonely country road for a mysterious benefactor who would never show. Authoritative, engaging, and eminently readable, The Theatre of the Absurd is nothing short of a classic: vital reading for anyone with an interest in the theatre.

Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett

Author: James Knowlson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2014-10-16

Total Pages: 878

ISBN-13: 1408857669

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_______________ 'A triumph of scholarship and sympathy... one of the great post-war biographies' - Independent 'A landmark in scholarly criticism... Knowlson is the world's largest Beckett scholar. His life is right up there with George Painter's Proust and Richard Ellmann's Joyce in sensitivity and fascination' - Daily Telegraph 'It is hard to imagine a fuller portrait of the man who gave our age some of the myths by which it lives' - Evening Standard _______________ SHORTLISTED FOR THE WHITBREAD PRIZE _______________ Samuel Beckett's long-standing friend, James Knowlson, recreates Beckett's youth in Ireland, his studies at Trinity College, Dublin in the early 1920s and from there to the Continent, where he plunged into the multicultural literary society of late-1920s Paris. The biography throws new light on Beckett's stormy relationship with his mother, the psychotherapy he received after the death of his father and his crucial relationship with James Joyce. There is also material on Beckett's six-month visit to Germany as the Nazi's tightened their grip. The book includes unpublished material on Beckett's personal life after he chose to live in France, including his own account of his work for a Resistance cell during the war, his escape from the Gestapo and his retreat into hiding. Obsessively private, Beckett was wholly committed to the work which eventually brought his public fame, beginning with the controversial success of "Waiting for Godot" in 1953, and culminating in the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.

How it is

Author: Samuel Beckett

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 1964

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13: 9780802150660

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This work relates the adventures of an unnamed narrator crawling through the mud while dragging a sack of canned food. It is written as a sequence of unpunctuated paragraphs divided into three sections.

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (Book Analysis)

Author: Bright Summaries

Publisher: BrightSummaries.com

Published: 2015-12-21

Total Pages: 25

ISBN-13: 2806294959

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Unlock the more straightforward side of Waiting for Godot with this concise and insightful summary and analysis! This engaging summary presents an analysis of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, a play which follows a pair of tramps over two days of their lives as they wait for a mysterious man called Godot. Nothing else really happens, and that is exactly the point of play: through the somewhat ridiculous protagonists and the complete lack of action in Waiting for Godot, Beckett points out that life itself has no meaning, and we spend most of it waiting for something – or someone – to come along and change this. Premiered in Paris in 1953, Waiting for Godot met with astonishing success, and has since been the subject of various different interpretations and even been voted “most significant English language play of the 20th century” according to a poll conducted by the British Royal National Theatre. Although Beckett wrote the French version of his play before its English counterpart, he was actually born in Ireland. He spent most of his life in Paris, and is regarded as one of the most prominent writers of the 20th century, as well as one of the most important dramatists of the Theatre of the Absurd. Find out everything you need to know about Waiting for Godot in a fraction of the time! This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you: • A complete plot summary • Character studies • Key themes and symbols • Questions for further reflection Why choose BrightSummaries.com? Available in print and digital format, our publications are designed to accompany you on your reading journey. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time. See the very best of literature in a whole new light with BrightSummaries.com!