WAITING FOR GODOT

At first when I finished the novel, I felt like I had read a joke. I asked myself repeatedly what is the meaning of the play, what is the purpose of making life look so meaningless, and above all, how can this make it to one of the most important classics in American literature? Then it dawned on me, this classic novel is drowned with symbolism. At first I thought of existentialism, but realized that it is not as broad as the existentialism of The Stranger per say, but it was existentialist in some level.

These men are waiting, for something or someone called Godot during two whole acts, under a tree, doing nothing. And I realized, that the symbolism behind this was not just waiting, but how humanity waits for God, their whole life, a fate every being in humanity is going to go through that, so they just wait for this mystical energy everyone is going to go through, everyone expects to meet, but no one knows what it’s like.

Another symbol in the novel is the dependence of Vladimir and Estragon of each other. They mention repeatedly how they can’t stand each other, but at the same time how they can’t live without clinging themselves one to the other, and that shows the human custom of attaching ourselves to things we know someday we will lose, and anyway we want them, because we feel the need to attach ourselves to something that will make us happy, even though it is certain that either way we will die alone and we can’t do anything about it.

The tree is something completely different regarding symbolism. For one thing, the tree changes drastically (having or not having leaves) from one act to the other, so we can infer that it also has to do with the loss of track of time. When someone is about 7 years old, they feel that one hour is an eternity, and one year is practically a lifetime. But as that kid starts getting older, hours are faster, years turn into minutes, and days turn into seconds, making us feel that when we turn 50, a lifetime has gone by, and we don’t even notice it. In the novel, the tree is always there, but the leaves change, so we can infer that the book is not a couple of days long, actually it’s years, but the characters feel it like days, proving my point, that humans after a while, lose track of time.