He also created his major dramatic style out of vaudevillian and silent-film skits by clownish characters who are determined to endure without understanding why they must. In this play, Beckett established his major tone of comic despair, with his characters resigned to waiting for something to happen that never happens. Only two tramps, two strangely united male travelers, and a boy are on the stage of Waiting for Godot.

With his first stunningly successful stage play, however, there is not a woman to be seen. His later work has begun to receive critical attention, particularly those plays that focus on women, such as Play and especially Not I.

Even though his vision of life and the human predicament is discouraging, his plays are rich with clownish characters, slapstick humor, word games, irony, and sarcasm, allowing laughter to triumph over material absurdity.īeckett is best known as the author of four intriguingly powerful stage plays Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Happy Days.

Whether it is in the nameless characters in Play, the lone and aging Krapp awaiting imminent death in Krapp’s Last Tape, the pathetic Winnie sinking in her grave in Happy Days, the dying family in the masochistic Endgame, the monotonous life of waiting of Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, or the down-and-outers in other dramatic works, Beckett demonstrates a preference for passive characters who attempt to make sense of an increasingly absurd existence and who struggle to survive in a universe that lacks love and meaningful relationships.Īs a critic, a transitional thinker, an innovator, and a postmodernist who probed the human condition and sensed the absurdity of the modern world, Beckett tried to link art and life into unusual theatrical images in order to etch human beings’ inner world and the human experience of consciousness. Beckett’s plays are made of such paradoxes. Laughter is an intellectual triumph over material absurdity, and self-denial is self-affirmation. What seems meaningless and absurd is shown to be the only meaning possible in a universe where the human experience of consciousness (as subject) seems trapped by a nature and body (as object) without consciousness. Like the character “O” who runs from the camera’s eye (“E”) in Film, Beckett’s art finds its form in a flight from conventional expectations and traditional observations. His themes are not constant, but they are grimly developed through a steady mood of ironic laughter if not outright sarcasm. In his stage plays, he parodies traditional dramatic action and borrows the techniques used in other modes of entertainment. The dramatic works of Samuel Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) reflect the evolution of his interests in various means of artistic expression, as he composed plays for stage, radio, cinema, and television.

Samuel beckett play waiting for godot