Beckett's Novel Achievement: Absurdist Comedy in Waiting for Godot James Little

In Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, the playwright bestows upon his work the veneer of comedy, but invests the heart of it with the "absurd", the tragic. He employs the gags and the routines, the circus comedy and the songs of the "lowbrow" arts, to underline and to sometimes undercut the many themes and ideas which are so apparent throughout. The two mains characters, Vladimir and Estragon, are of course clearly derived from the pairs of cross-talk comedians of music halls, in effect more resembling clowns than tramps. Their dialogue has the peculiarly repetitive quality of the cross-talk comedian's patter, masking the profound ideas throughout within "idle discourse". Beckett uses this comedic format in order to better explore the bleak world of Waiting for Godot.

To begin with, the world of Christianity is something that Beckett explores throughout the play. The Christian tradition indeed is one of the tragedies of the characters. Their imaginations and thoughts abound with half remembered images, stories and models of behaviour from the Bible: the Dead Sea, pale blue ("I used to say, that's where we'll go for our honeymoon"), the two thieves, John the Baptist,...