About Modernism and Postmodernism in ‘Waiting for Godot’ by Samuel Beckett.

1. Modernism and Postmodernism
in ‘Waiting for Godot’
Prepared by
Anjali Rathod

2. Name : Anjali Rathod
Sem : 2
Roll No : 2
Enrollment No : 4069206420220024
Subject : Modernism and Postmodernism in ‘Waiting
for Godot’
Subject code : 22400
Contact Info : rathodanjali20022002ui@gmail.com
Submitted to : S. B. Gardi Department of English ,
MK Bhavnagar University

3. ➢ About the Author
➢ About the Play
➢ Postmodernism in the Play
➢ Modernist Autonomy
➢ References
Points to Ponder

4. About the Author
➢ Beckett(1906-1989) was an author, critic,and playwright, winner of the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1969. He wrote in both French and English and perhaps
best known for his plays, especially En Attendant Godot(1952; Waiting for Godot).
➢ Beckett’s life as a prologue to the work, to see in his personal experiences an
explanation of his art, retrospectively to locate through biography.
➢ Beckett’s work has attracted ,from the historical and biographical to
existentialist, Post-Structuralist and linguistic readings.
➢ The significance of language in Beckett is well articulated, from its compelling
tightrope dance between the ‘obligation to express’ and the lack of anything to
express, to the paradoxically liberating ‘impotence’ Beckett found in writing in
French.
➢ From Mid 1940s onward, his biographical outline consists almost entirely of texts
written , published and performed , as though his life had segued into his work,
the one making way for the other: even the Nobel Prize he received in 1969 had
no greatest visible effect than to send him into hiding.

5. ➢ Waiting for Godot ,presented by Irelands the Gate Theatre at Chicago’s International
Theatre Festival, was an exhilarating experience ,directed by Walter D. Asmus, the five
actors, John Murphy as Estragon, Barry McGovern as Vladimir, Stephen Brennan as
Lucky, Alan Stanford as Pozzo, Eamon Young as Godot’s messenger all gave strong
performances in an ensemble that was elegantly balanced on its tragicomic edge.
➢ Lucky’s speech brought him to an upright position, and once could glimpse in his
soaring delivery something of what he had once been, but which began, ofcourse, to
disintegrate before us.
➢ Estragon was extremely self absorbed , intent on getting a brief escape through sleep,
often pulled back into routines by Didi or initiating them, but basically turned inward
and poised to leave , poet and christ figure, absorbed by his pain.
➢ Vladimir was a constant comic joy; one couldn’t help but feel that he was a kind of
Beckett incarnate terribly good natured in his suffering, seeing in the joke in at all,but
forbidden to laugh. He brought deep understanding of Beckett to the role and a love of
the play that gave the role and production warmth as well as intelligence and love to
temper despair.
About the Play

6. Postmodernism in the Play
➢ “Postmodernism means different things from humble literary-critical origins
in the 1950s, to a level of a global conceptualization in the 1980s.”
➢ Waiting for Godot is indeed a play about the ruler and the ruled, which is one
of the main features Beckett liked to describe in his works. The cross-gender
and the cross-cultural performances can emphasize or exaggerate that point,
sometimes in a postmodern parodic way.
➢ The label ‘Postmodern Quality’ is an appropriate one to explain many of the
recent and future performances of Waiting for Godot , because it is so
common but not thought about carefully enough.
➢ Philippe Adrian’s Waiting for Godot had a contemporary urban atmosphere
with its characters rhythmical language.

7. Continues…
➢ The Postmodern Quality that the self loses its rigid identity was , a tiny
production of Waiting for Godot by the Ad Hoc theatre company in london, in
1955.
➢ Estragon and Vladimir were played by Palestinians in Arabic, while Pozzo and
Lucky were played by Jews in Hebrew but Lucky’s speech was in Arabic.
➢ It described the tragedy of Palestinians who were deprived of their land, the
Friction between Palestinians and Jews and finally the possibility of their
helping each other.
➢ In Waiting for Godot , as it mentioned, “Adam”, the symbol of the whole human
being , but sometimes they are nobody with no certainty about who they are,
and why they are there. In this play ,there always exists a tension and an anxiety
about their situation , which pulls us back to the modern sense of what is man.

8. Modernist Autonomy
➢ Beckett’s Play, Godot typifies the aspiration to aesthetic autonomy that has
provoked deep suspicion of Modernism among many politically motivated
and socially conscious critics, and that complicates attempts to situate it
anywhere at all.
➢ Godot , a difficult, opaque, and abstract play written by an Irishman in France
and firmly absorbed into the traditional canon of European Modernism.
➢ Waiting for Godot in New Orleans opens an ambivalent space in which new
developments in Modernist studies especially the emerging field of
transnational Modernism are brought into dialogue with existing debates
within theatre studies , even as it calls both fields to take fuller account of
aspects of Modernism , particularly Modernist Autonomy.

9. ● Boyce, Brynhildur. Nordic Irish Studies, vol. 6, 2007, pp. 151–56. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30001573.
Accessed 12 Mar. 2023.
● Burkman, Katherine H. Theatre Journal, vol. 45, no. 1, 1993, pp. 100–04. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3208588.
Accessed 12 Mar. 2023.
● Esslin, Martin J.. "Samuel Beckett". Encyclopedia Britannica, 18 Dec. 2022,
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Beckett. Accessed 11 March 2023.
● Moody, Alys. “Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: Modernist Autonomy and Transnational Performance in Paul
Chan’s Beckett.” Theatre Journal, vol. 65, no. 4, 2013, pp. 537–57. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24580426.
Accessed 11 Mar. 2023.
● Tanaka, Mariko Hori. “POSTMODERN STAGINGS OF ‘WAITING FOR GODOT.’” Samuel Beckett Today /
Aujourd’hui, vol. 6, 1997, pp. 55–62. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25781208. Accessed 11 Mar. 2023.
References

10. Thank You