The play ‘Waiting for Godot’ by Samuel Beckett is internationally renowned for it’s seemingly indecipherable content. It is an accumulation of random and dead end thoughts, ideas and metaphors; each one as confusing as the next, and although a lot of intriguing concepts can be seen by looking at the text as a whole, it seems fairly futile to follow much of the dialogue through.
In this pastiche
I have tried to recreate the chaos, confusion and despair portrayed in
the play, with close reference and parallels to the original, to be discussed
further in the justification.
I decided to leave the main (and only) characters anonymous for the following
reason. To me, the names ‘Vladimir’ and ‘Estragon’
in the original text are a fundamental part of their character. In both
cases the wonderfully elaborate name makes you imagine wildly eccentric
and overly deep characters, which perfectly contrasts the confused, chaotic
and often pathetic Estragon and Vladimir that we know from the play (a
perfect example of how we rely falsely on our expectations.) To copy this
and simply invent unusual names for the characters in my pastiche would
have been unoriginal, and the effect would be lost. Equally I would not
have been content with giving them every-day names as it would have deadened
their character, so I decided to leave them both nameless.
The main theme
from the original that I have paralleled in the pastiche is timelessness.
Vladimir and Estragon constantly repeat themselves, forget what they have
done in the near past, and even forget other characters in the play, to
the extent that the reader is left wondering if they are caught in some
kind of loop where the only thing that they are certain of is that they
are ‘waiting for Godot.’
In this pastiche the characters are never sure where they are in the play
they are reading, and go over the same ground over and over again as to
where to start. Again, their only certainty, their ‘purpose’
is that of finishing the play. In both cases, towards the end it seems
more and more likely that they will never fulfil their objective, as they
simply haven’t progressed at all since the beginning.
The other major theme that I have portrayed from the original is the confusion of getting to grips with a seemingly unfathomable topic- in the play- life itself, and in the pastiche- the play. In both cases the characters make some insightful comments and ideas, but fail to follow them through and so remain in exactly the same position, having made no progress at all. Part of this is to do with the fact that the two characters don’t feed off of each others thoughts enough- as soon as one comes up with something insightful, the other is reduced to one or two word comments which make the situation no clearer at all (and in most cases are counterproductive), and soon they are reduced back to bouncing random lines between them, darting off on random irrelevances; completely unable to progress.
In modern literature, ‘Waiting for Godot’ is unquestionably one of a kind in the way it invokes confusion and despair in the reader; who often feels –just like Estragon and Vladimir- that they have not progressed at all since the beginning of the play. Here, I have attempted to portray some of my understanding of the play into this modest pastiche, in an original, insightful, yet enjoyable manner.
