Many people have studied the article "Waiting for Godot" in Chinese textbooks, and I believe that after you read it, you will not be able to help but complain: "What things did this author write?" ”
Waiting for Godot is the pioneering work of absurdist drama, telling a story of "nothing happened, no one came, and no one left."
By a dead tree on a country road, two tramps were waiting for Godot, and to pass the time, they said something boring and made some boring movements, and the last little boy ran up to them and told them, "Godot is not coming today, tomorrow is coming."
The next day, at the same time, in the same place, the two tramps came to wait for Godot again, repeating the boredom of the previous day, but in the end nothing was waiting.
No plot, no dramatic conflict, no stark characters, incoherent dialogue, inexplicable action, is such a story that caused a huge sensation when it was first performed in Paris in 1953.
On the one hand, some critics said that "there is nothing worse than it", but on the other hand, the play became the most popular play in post-war France, with more than three hundred consecutive performances.
In 1957, the San Francisco Theater Company brought Waiting for Godot to St. Quentin's Prison, something that had puzzled mature audiences in Paris and London, but was warmly welcomed by the prisoners. They see their own shadow in this boring, hopeless, suffocating drama.
It is not easy to disagree that this play is not easy to understand. Godot in "Waiting for Godot" did not appear from beginning to end. Who Godot really is, we don't know, nor does the author Beckett.
<h1>1. He created a new form of fiction and drama, reaping the Nobel Prize in Literature</h1>
In fact, Beckett's work has been a path away from the tradition of realism from the beginning.
From 1928 to 1930, while teaching English at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he became acquainted with and influenced the famous modernist writer James Joyce.
In his view, the artist's responsibility is to express his entire complex experience, ignoring the public's demands for easy-to-understand laziness.
Author Beckett
After the end of World War II, faced with a world that had been destroyed both materially and spiritually, an absurd, incomprehensible, and incapable world to save, Beckett abandoned the traditional drama practice of representing the world with rational logic and plot, no longer using reason to argue the absurdity of the world, but using stage images to present this absurdity. In other words, he wants to express absurdity with absurdity.
A British scholar once said of Beckett:
"The dark depiction of life in his plays is something we don't have to accept, but his contribution to the art of theatre is enough to win our gratitude and respect." He depicts the plight of human beings, but introduces the drama to the new village of willows and flowers. ”
In 1969, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for "expressing human suffering in a sublime art in a new form of fiction and drama."
<h1>2. Facing the absurdity of the world and life is where the bravery and dignity of man lie</h1>
There are no distinct characters in this work, no philosophical dialogue, no clear themes, and some are just unrecognizable characters, engaged in illogical nagging and falling into a nightmare of repetition.
But you have to admit that it does give us thought. The world is absurd, illogical, fate is unknown, some people are saved, some people are punished, some people have become slaves, some people have waved their whips, those who herd goats have been treated preferentially, those who have been herding sheep have been beaten, those who were still arrogant yesterday are trampled on today, and what is even more absurd is that people can do nothing about it.
Why is this so?
Speaking of which, it is necessary to introduce the background of the creation of this play. After the Second World War, the Western world was in ruins and the whole society was in the process of reconstruction. War not only destroyed people's material homes, but also brought people a serious spiritual crisis.
More and more Westerners are beginning to reflect on traditional Christian beliefs and question the existence of God.
If there really is God, why doesn't God save people when they suffer in war? If there is no God, what is the meaning of life?
People have lost the support of religion, reason has been proved to be so untrustworthy, the development of science and technology and material abundance do not necessarily bring people a good life, the explosion of the atomic bomb, but also showed a high degree of rationality and civilization of the barbaric consequences.
In such a disillusioned world, humanity has become an irreducible exile. In the face of this terrible situation, where is the way out? How should people exist?
Perhaps, as Vladimir says in the play, in this great chaos, only one thing is clear: we are waiting for Godot to come.
So, who is Godot? Some say Godot is God, some people think God represents "nothingness" and "death," and Beckett himself says, "If I had known, I would have said it in the play." ”
Maybe it doesn't matter who Godot is, or even whether Godot will come or not, what matters is hope and waiting.
As the British critic Martin Earlings put it: "We are always waiting for something throughout the long course of our lives; Godot embodies what we are waiting for— it may be an event, a thing, a person or death."
In addition to death, this waiting is often not necessarily truly realized.
However, like Sisyphus pushing the stone, knowing that the stone will roll down the next day, he still insists on pushing it, because he looks directly at the absurdity of his own fate and refuses to bow to the gods. He knew that his fate was the result of free choice, and succeeded in having a "destiny of self-transcendence through contempt", from which he considered himself happy.
Similarly, in the face of an absurd world, in the face of an embarrassing fate, waiting is a kind of struggle and courage.
In the form of absurdity, "Waiting for Godot" expresses the spiritual crisis of Western society in a specific historical period, "popping up the voice of disappointment of an era", but it is this bitter wait in disappointment, the courage to try to find hope in despair, "so that modern people have been lifted from the situation of poverty" .
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