Write about the symbolisms in the Symbolisms in the play Waiting for Godot?

 

Symbols in Waiting for Godot 

Introduction: 

        Since the very beginning of drama symbols have been used in dramas.  It is only after the emergence of poetic drama and expressionistic drama that symbolism became a part of drama and symbols came to be used extensively.  The play of Yeats, Maeterlink, Eliot, Eliot, Fry, Auden and Isherwood are very rich in symbols.  Their symbols are highly functional and suggestive.  Beckett has used symbols is his novels as well as plays.  His Waiting for Godot is very rich in symbols.

Beckett as a symbolist:

                Beckett is a father to his characters, that is he treats them cruelly, mutilating, martyrizing, killing, sometimes even eating them.  Beckett clothes and antimates  his “puppets” with a symbolism that is harsh, violent, bitter and not only original  but personal.  “Beckett’s is a symbolism of persecution, terror, suffering and mockery represented by a few external images, a few properties and the physical make-up of the  characters”.  It makes his works difficult and obscure.

Godot as a symbol:

                The word ‘Godot’ itself is deeply and variously symbolic.  Godot represents something godly or godlike.  He is the  “earthly ideal of a better social order”.  Godot also means death or silence.  He sometimes represents the inaccessible self.  Furthermore the name of Godot suggests the intervention of a supernatural agency or stands for a mythical human being whose arrival is expressed  to change the situation.  Godot represents, to the two tramps, peace, rest from waiting a sense of having arrived in a heaven.  Godot, thus represents the objective of their waiting-an event, a thing, a person, death.  Godot’s white beard reminds us of the image of the old-father aspect of God.  His irrational preference for one of the two brothers recalls Jehovah’s treatment of Cain and Abel; so does his power to punish those who would dare to ignore him.  He also symbolises salvation.  Another view is that Godot represents silence, the tramps have to speak while waiting for it in order to have the right to be still at last.

Symbolism in the Two Tramps:

                The two tramps represent the ordeal of waiting, and this ordeal is one which is experienced by almost every human being at one time or the other and in many cases, all through life.  In addition to the ordeal of waiting, these men represent ignorance, helplessness, impotence and boredom.  They do not have the essential knowledge:  they do not know who exactly Godot is:  they do not know what would happen if they stopped waiting for Godot.  Thus, they are ignorant.  The entire experience of Vladimir and Estragon has a universal application, and it is this fat which lends to the play a wide appeal.  They are illustrative of the themes of habit, boredom and “the suffering of being”.

The symbolic significance of Pozzo and Lucky:

                According to one interpretation, these two men represent a master and a slave.  According to other interpretations, Pozzo and Lucky symbolise the relationship between capital and labour or between wealth and the artist.  Another view is that this relationship has an autobiographical origin, Pozzo representing James Joyce and Lucky representing Samuel Beckett.   One of the critics said that Pozzo is no other that Godot himself.  Another critic said that Lucky may be Godot.  Yet another view is that Lucky suggests the Biblical figure of Christ.  There is also the view that Pozzo represents mankind, and Lucky represents Christ.

The Symbolic tree:

                The personality of a tree is in its leaves, of which this one is symbolically divested.  As a tree, it is a failure; significantly, Estragon’s question introduces yet another vain attempt at suicide a gesture which the tree inspires recurrently, its significance cannot be redeemed through botanical classification.  Therefore Vladimir brings forth from within himself a name that designates the tree as merely  a necessary part of the landscape.  He admits that he does not know to what species the tree belongs and it is very likely not a willow.  But it is a characteristic of him that he should even attempt to endow a part of the nightmare with the illusory substance of words.  They are an important part of his existence.  Estragon tries to escape more directly, short of death itself, he assumes the foetal position and sleeps.  Or, if that is not possible, he turns his back on the event, the speculation, or the threat, repeating his leit-motive “I’m leaving”.  Such is the form of his escape fantasies for Vladimir, they are sentences which he weaves and which Estragon cuts off so rudely.

Other symbols:

                The tramp’s shoes, unwieldy and ill fitting are symbolic of the essential instability of the human construct, the vertically of the cathedral once symbolized man as aspiration in this drama of waiting for an absent God, man in collapse falls in with the circular motive of frustration.  Life endures only as the anticipation of suffering, Pozzo comments as he relights his pipe, “The second one is never so sweet…as the first”.

Conclusion:

                Thus, it is clear that the play, “Waiting for Godot” is a richly symbolic play.  The title, the characters, the setting are all symbolic.  The play wright has used words as symbols too.  The beauty of the play lies in the fact that the dramatist has minimized the use of words and yet has conveyed a great deal of meaning through his symbols.