Waiting for Godot
The purpose of human life is an unanswerable question. It seems impossible to find an answer because we don 't know where to begin looking or whom to ask. Existence, to us, seems to be something imposed upon us by an unknown force. There is no apparent meaning to it, and yet we suffer as a result of it. The world seems utterly chaotic. We therefore try to impose meaning on it through pattern and fabricated purposes to distract ourselves from the fact that our situation is hopelessly unfathomable. "Waiting for Godot" is a play that captures this feeling and view of the world, and characterizes it with archetypes that symbolize humanity and its behaviour when faced with this knowledge. According to the play, a human being 's life is totally dependent on chance, and, by extension, time is meaningless; therefore, a human 's life is also meaningless, and the realization of this drives humans to rely on nebulous, outside forces, which may be real or not, for order and direction.
The basic premise of the play is that chance is the underlying factor behind existence. Therefore human life is determined by chance. This is established very early on, when Vladimir mentions the parable of the two thieves from the Bible. "One of the thieves was saved. It 's a reasonable percentage" (Beckett, 8). The idea of "percentage" is important because this represents how the fate of humanity is determined; it is random, and there is a percentage chance that a person will be saved or damned. Vladimir continues by citing the disconcordance of the Gospels on the story of the two thieves. "And yet...how is it - this is not boring you I hope - how is it that of the four Evangelists only one speaks of a thief being saved. The four of them were there - or thereabouts - and only one speaks of a thief being saved" (Beckett, 9). Beckett makes an important point with this example of how chance is woven into even the most sacred of texts that is supposed to hold ultimate truth for humanity. All
The basic premise of the play is that chance is the underlying factor behind existence. Therefore human life is determined by chance. This is established very early on, when Vladimir mentions the parable of the two thieves from the Bible. "One of the thieves was saved. It 's a reasonable percentage" (Beckett, 8). The idea of "percentage" is important because this represents how the fate of humanity is determined; it is random, and there is a percentage chance that a person will be saved or damned. Vladimir continues by citing the disconcordance of the Gospels on the story of the two thieves. "And yet...how is it - this is not boring you I hope - how is it that of the four Evangelists only one speaks of a thief being saved. The four of them were there - or thereabouts - and only one speaks of a thief being saved" (Beckett, 9). Beckett makes an important point with this example of how chance is woven into even the most sacred of texts that is supposed to hold ultimate truth for humanity. All
Bibliography: Works Cited Andres, Gunther. Being without Time: On Beckett 's Play Waiting for Godot. Ed. Martin Esslin. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965. 140-152. Astro, Alan. Understanding Samuel Beckett. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1954. Mercier, Vivian. Beckett / Beckett. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. States, Bernard. The Shape of Paradox: An Essay on Waiting for Godot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Webb, Eugene. The Plays of Samuel Beckett. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972.