It is one of the joys of this century that our lives have been enriched by a wide variety of styles of commentary and analysis, wherein one can propound bull-shit in disparate modes of baffle-gab. Here, for your delectation, are examples of some of the possibilities.
Preacher:
Let us turn to the play, Waiting For Godot,
which has an important message for us. Who is this Godot that these people are
waiting for? Is it not clearly God? What this is play is showing us is that
people who only wait for God, who do not welcome Him into their hearts, lead
meaningless lives of quiet desperation. It is only the love of God blah, blah,
blah...
Marxist:
Waiting For Godot is an essential parable of
the class struggle. On one side we have the ultimate capitalist, Godot, remote,
invisible, powerful, whose caprices dictate trivia in the lives of the working
class. On the other hand we have representatives of the working class,
alienated, leading meaningless lives at the behest and convenience of the
Capitalist class. This play shows what happens when the working class does not
unite. It is only when the working class unites blah blah blah...
Freudian:
Waiting For Godot is a rationalized dream
scene which symbolically expresses the fundamental nature of separation anxiety.
Off stage we have the absent parent, all powerful, loved and needed, but not
present. On stage we have avatars of the essential child, neurotically cycling
through different defense mechanisms blah blah blah....
Artsy-Fartsy:
Waiting For Godot is a seminal work of
the theatre. The peculiar deadness in life of the action, illuminates the
intrinsic death of the bourgeois mentality which, when stripped of artistic
sensibility, is reduced to apparent meaninglessness. However the play shows us
that even within the restricted lives of the emasculated philistine, there are
layers upon layers of symbolism. Blah blah blah...
Feminist:
Waiting For Godot epitomizes the bankruptcy
of the patriarchy. Womyn is not present in this obsessive nightmare of
phallocentric hierarchy save for the misogynist "servant as symbolic woman"
figure. Godot is the antithesis of the Goddess, distant, inaccessible, cold, and
masculine. Blah blah blah...
Evolutionary psychologist:
Waiting For Godot is a
nice literary illustration of two modes of primate alpha dominance, both
pre-human and human. The master/servant relationship illustrates the pre-human,
directly physical nature of dominance whereas Godot dominates those waiting for
him through the uniquely human mode of symbolic expression. Blah blah blah...
Zen:
Not waiting for Godot is also waiting for Godot.
Deconstructionist:
What is this text showing us? What
is its relationship to its Other? What is it showing us as differance? Is
perhaps, Godot a mirror embedded within the text, reflecting the action upon
itself? In a certain way this is so, a trope, a metaphor for that reflection
which is not directly in the text but is, rather, a trace but not an
arche-trace. Blah blah blah...
This page was last updated September 7, 1998