"Il mondo dei giocolieri a 360°" in formato .pdf (Acrobat Reader)

- Absence of plot and action: all happens in the static situation of waiting for something or
someone;
- Absence of personality and psychological analysis in the characters;
- Absence of dialogues in traditional sense: the dialogue is only sketched and often a lack of
communication is shown by pauses, silences and gags.
The idea of the absurd is strengthened by a perfect symmetrical structure: the play is divided into
two acts, the stage is divided in two parts, the human are divided first in two, Vladimir and
Estragon, and then in four, them two and Pozzo and Lucky and eventually also human’s sort and
Godot’s sort are divided. This division of the characters makes each one the complementary of the
other one and they can not exist independently: Vladimir is practical and decided to wait, Estragon
is a dreamer and sceptical about Godot. Pozzo and Lucky are also physically linked by a rope which
represents their tyrannical relationship: Lucky is the slave and stands for the power of the mind
while Pozzo is the oppressor and stands for the power of the body. Their relationship can be
interpreted as the one that links capitalist and proletariat.
The name of Godot is probably obtained adding to God the French suffix “ot”, which means
“little”; this can be connected to a religious interpretation, even if the most important thing of the
title, and of the play, is not Godot, but the waiting, an action humans do just to kill time and fill life.
The play presents the idea of a life in which men are waiting for something, but nothing will never
happen, because nothing can never happen: man’s destiny is casual and absurd. This vision of life
takes origin from the period during which it has been worked out. The experience of the Second
World War and the Cold War between USA and USSR created a climate of tension and diffidence,
positivism caused the decline of religions and moral values, both liberal and socialist economic and
social theories failed: all these elements contributed to make the human existence intolerable. The
life seemed to be an imprisonment spent “between the compulsion of birth and the worse
compulsion of death”, as Richard Coe said. The man appears trapped and lost in a hostile universe,
where there is no chance for happiness.
After all, Didi and Gogo can be seen as the emblem of absurdity. They are never described as
tramps and in fact we can understand from their clothes and gags that they are clowns. In this case,
differently from the clown of Aldo Palazzeschi, they do not symbolise the freedom, but the
consequence of lack of freedom in human life: the man lives in the world as the clown behaves in a
circus. It would not make any sense trying to act rationally because does not exist an objective to
reach. Now we comprehend why often the dialogue is substituted by gags: Beckett wanted to
destroy any form of logic and reason. If there is no reason in the universe, just an eternal waiting for
nothing, there should not be any consistency at all.
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