Waiting For Godo Essay

6 Pages 1392 Words

Waiting for Godot: A Social Critique

One of the few unarguable intents of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is the author’s desire to impact his audience. With floating images, an obscure story line, and nonsensical dialogue, the reader is continually delving into Beckett’s text for further meaning in the play. Ironically, Beckett’s absurdist messages suggest that it is this sort of search for order in an irrational universe that will only lead to conflict. Within his play Beckett makes several attempts to satirize human beings’ need for order. He targets both religious organization and social structure. More specifically, in Waiting for Godot, Beckett criticizes the institution of western capitalism through the relationships of his characters.
Samuel Beckett’s existentialist ideas clearly influenced his writings. The movement’s stress of the individual existence and its portrayal of human beings as totally free and responsible for their own actions does not promote rules in life and structured institutions. The belief in the irreducibility of experience to any system is also at the core of existentialist thought. Thus, reducing people’s lives to economic classes and containing them in this social hierarchy violated existentialist ideas. Beckett places each of his main characters in defined Marxist roles to illustrate this point.
Karl Marx’s theories are based on the conviction that socialism is inevitable. He, like existentialists, emphasized individualism. Marx went as far as to claim the individual as the highest being. According to his theories, Marx viewed all of history as torn with conflict. This chaos out of a search for order is very much an existentialist idea. Traditional Marxism places the rich bourgeoisie against the poor proletariat. In this play, both Godot and Pozzo represent an aristocratic ruling class. Vladimir, Estragon, and Lucky are the exploited laborers who are at the mercy of their r...