Who, or What, Is Godot? Sophie Lis 12th Grade

In Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, the two main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, spend the entire duration of the text waiting for the illusive Godot, leaving the two in a cyclic and repetitive course of events as they wait for him to appear. Although the name in itself suggests that Beckett intended for Godot to symbolize God, a claim which the author denied, further analysis of the text hints at the view that Godot may not be a deity, but instead a representation of death. This is embodied in the general notion of Vladimir and Estragon’s habitual waiting, boredom, and inability to kill themselves, putting forth the idea that their situation may be a metaphor for the human experience, waiting for the release of death to free them from the chore of reality.

As seen in the major motif of time that reappears throughout the text, Vladimir and Estragon spend both acts in the process of literally waiting for the arrival of Godot. In essence, the text suggests that both men have been under the tree for an extended period of time, so long that they forget that they have been there before as each day is as insignificant as the next. As a result, “time had no meaning for them” (Bigham, “The Meaning Of Time As Depicted In...