What do I need to know to understand Becketts Waiting for Godot?
I understand your confusion. The play is about waiting, and waiting is one of those subjects that — normally — no one writes about. It’s what we cut past, so that stories will be more exciting than real life. Rather than doing that, Beckett chose to confront waiting dead on. He made it the center-piece of the story. He looked at waiting from every angle. If you think about it (think about standing in a long line at the post office), waiting is aggravating, absurd, boring, tragic and many other things. While we wait, we reflect, we ponder, we go numb, we get angry … we do all sorts of things. Waiting is part of the human experience. You will enjoy “Godot” or not if… a) you think it’s a part of the human experience worth exploring, and b) you connect with Beckett’s way (and the specific production’s way) of exploring it. But it is — or at least was, when it came out, a pretty unique play. No one had really delved into waiting like this, before Beckett.
