Seeing Myself in Waiting for Godot :: Waiting for Godot Essays

Seeing Myself in hold for Godot Some stack wondered why in high school my favorite book was delay for Godot, a drama described on the title page as a two-act play in which nothing happens twice. In fact, my liking a play that does not portray a series of connected incidents vocalizing a story but kind of presents a pattern of images exhibit bewildered people in an incomprehensible universe initially flummox me too, as my partiality was more felt than thought. But then I read a piece by the critic Martin Esslin, who articulated my feelings. He wrote in The Search for the Self that throughout our lives we always wait for something, and Godot only when represents the objective of our delayan event, a thing, aperson, death. It is in the act of waiting that we experience theflow of time in its purest most evident form. (31)I realized that I was seventeen in high school passively waiting for something amazing to happen to me just like Vladimir and tarragon. I similarly realized th at experiencing time flowing by unproductively was not for me disregarding of how pure that experience might be. At several points in the play, Estragon states that he wants to leave, but Vladimir always responds, We cant . . . were waiting for Godot (8). Neither one knows why the wait nor who Godot is or looks like, and they both admit, when asked by Pozzo why they mistook him for Godot, that we hardly know him at all (20). Yet, they wait for him instead of looking within themselves for meaning in their lives. They even turn to close-at-hand sources close to them to provide reasons for their wait from inside a hat or a boot (8). But, as Lucky points out, the reasons are unknown and always will be (28). Therefore, their external search is pointless to give life meaning. Or range another way, Vladimir and Estragon wait endlessly for life to begin.As candid as it is, I see myself in them, waiting for someone or something to bring me meaning, to guide me, to spark my life. The exis tentialist ideas behind much of Waiting for Godot cut to the quick, as I, too, struggle through life trying to light upon some sort of purposeful meaning (Bryce). Like everyone else, I am a victim of waiting and going nowhere fast. As uneasy as it is to me now, in high school, I ached as I searched to take on an empty part of me with love or true friendship, and at die I found him But rather than acting on what I felt for him, I sat there and waited, hoping that he would notice me, the stark(a) soul mate.