Samuel Beckett was born in Ireland in 1906 to a Jewish family. Beckett began writing when he was a teenager. By the end of the war, he had published many poems and novels. His novels from 1948 to 1949 included the novel trilogy "Molloy" , "Marona Is Dying", "The Unknown Man", these novels all intend to illustrate that life is a repeated arduous and futile wandering, a small and meaningless wandering in the heart. "Waiting for Godot", created in 1948, is the most accomplished, influential and representative absurdist drama among them. The play highlights the disillusionment of Westerners from different planes and highlights the endless cycle of life without purpose. The first and second acts differ in time (both are at dusk), location (both are empty fields), and content (both two people appear first, and after a lengthy dialogue, the master and servant appear, and then the boy appears to deliver a message) Similar in several ways. Especially the content, at the end it returns to where it started. We can completely imagine that if the play has a third act and a fourth act, it will definitely repeat the formula of the first two acts. These all show the monotony and rigidity of people's situation, as well as the endless suffering in life.
From the perspective of the play, Godot is just a faint hope to support the tramps Didi and Gogo to pass the time, and is a life-saving straw for them to survive: "Godot is here, let's Saved." But he didn't come, and they were so depressed that they wanted to hang themselves. But can they die? No, because they have to wait for Godot. In Beckett's view, life is like this, both difficult to live and difficult to die, both hopeful and desperate. And ultimately it is hopeless. Despite this, "we still have to wait for Godot, and we will continue to wait." Beckett tries to make people aware of the condition of the world, the ridiculousness of reality, the division of self and the ubiquitous death in a shocking way. It depicts people as being trapped in a whirlpool of incomprehensible power. The author hopes to depict the chaos of things. , Boredom makes a deep impression on people. What it shows in front of people is a world where there is nothing, and people slowly spend their meaningless lives in it.
As Beckett's famous work and a representative work of absurdist drama, "Waiting for Godot" has indeed reached an unprecedented height in art. His drama works include "The Last Game", "Ah, Beautiful Days", "Drama.", etc. In 1969, Beckett won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The reason for the award was: "His novels and dramas with novel forms have inspired modern people from spiritual poverty." Representatives of the Royal Swedish Academy praised his drama at the award ceremony for "the purifying effect of Greek tragedy."
The theme and core of "Waiting for Godot" is waiting for hope. It is a modern tragedy that expresses mankind's eternal search for hope in despair. "Godot" as a pronoun has always been a hazy phantom, a mirage in a nightmare. Although Godot does not appear, he is the primary figure who determines the fate of the characters and becomes the central clue throughout the whole story. Godot seems to come, but always doesn't come. Gogo and Didi lived in such a harsh environment. They couldn't even eat bones if they wanted to live, and they didn't even have a rope if they wanted to die. But they are still persistently hoping and longing for it. Regardless of whether Godot will come or not, and regardless of whether the hope will come true, it gives people in despair an extra layer of spiritual sustenance. If Gogo and Didi live boredly and hope in an absurd world, which has a humorous element, then their persistence in waiting in hopeless hope is also touching. They neither knew who Godot was nor when Godot would come, so they just waited patiently. Didi said: "We are no longer lonely, waiting for the night, waiting for Godot, waiting, waiting." It was getting dark, and Godot did not come, which meant that the day was coming, but he did not come the next day. In the second act, four or five leaves grew out of the dead tree overnight. Gogo and Didi's clothes became more ragged and their living conditions worse. Pozzo became blind and Lucky became mute. The two-day waiting scene in the play is a symbol of the long life. It's true that "Godot's delay in coming makes those who wait for him suffer to death." "Waiting for Godot" reveals to us a cruel social reality, and also gives us great enlightenment: hope exists, but waiting for the realization of hope is unknown, and waiting means disillusionment. Despite this, human beings should still "do what they know is impossible to do." The waiting for hope in "Waiting for Godot" embodies Beckett's existential humanitarian thought of not wanting to push painful mankind into the abyss of despair, leaving a light of hope in despair.