Name: - Insiyafatema Alvani
Roll No: - 11
Semester: - 2 (Batch 2022-24)
Enrolment number: 4069206420220001
Paper No: - 107
Paper name: - The Twentieth Century Literature: From World War II to the End of the Century
Paper code: - 22400
Topic: - Language Analysis in Play 'Waiting for Godot'
Submitted to: - Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Email Address: insiyafatemaalvani@gmail.com
Language Analysis in Play 'Waiting for Godot'
About Author:
Born 13 April 1906
Died 22 December 1989
Awards And Honors:
Nobel Prize (1969)
Movement/Style: Theatre of the Absurd
Notable Works:
- 'All That Fall'
- 'Come and Go'
- 'Happy Days'
- 'Krapp’s Last Tape'
- 'The Unnamable'
- 'Waiting for Godot'
- 'Watt'
Samuel Beckett, the Irish playwright, theater director, novelist and poet, is one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906, where as a young man he studied French, Italian and English at Trinity College. He went to Paris for the first time in 1928 - he would spend most of his adult life there - to teach English. During World War Two, his Irish citizenship allowed him to remain in Paris and he worked as a courier for the French resistance.
Playwriting:
After the war Beckett settled in Paris and began a prolific period as a writer. His most famous play, Waiting for Godot' - the play in which, as one critic put it, nothing happens, twice - was first performed in 1953 at the Théâtre de Babylone on the Left Bank in Paris. A young Peter Hall directed the English language premiere in 1955 at the Arts Theatre in London, where, with its emphasis on silence and repetition.
After Waiting for Godot, Beckett went on to write Endgame (1957), Krapp's Last Tape (1958) and Happy Days (1961). While most of his work was written in French and later translated into English by Beckett. Beckett died in 1989 and is buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.
Introduction:
The post-war generation all over Europe and America faced the trauma of disappointment. The world turned chaotic and disintegrated. It was in such a stifling environment that many labels in the field of drama emerged, for instance, the theater of the grotesque, existentialism, the absurdist theater and the theater of cruelty. In the early beginning, the majority of these experiments were received with interruption and satirical smiles. The pessimism, hopelessness and core of estrangement permeated everywhere.
The twentieth century playwrights embody the grief of the sufferings of the modern age, which have a common application. Harman Hesse accurately highlights that the style of the present- day life has become far more harsh and terrible than ever before. Literature is the record of that fear. Pirandello, an Italian poet, thinks that everything is transitory. Samuel Becket insists on the emptiness and meaninglessness of life. Becket and many other dramatists believe that life is full of tricks. Failure, fortune, success, youth and love are words only, full of sound and rage suggesting nothing. We feel loneliness. We are estranged. We no longer have communication with the rest of humans. There is rarely any deed, and the dialogue is boring and contradictory - language similar to everything else, is incapable of giving sense to a meaningless world.
The Core of Language in 'Waiting for Godot':
Samuel Beckett has preferred to write in a language that always explores that the world is meaningless and disordered, that human beings are lonely and in misery. He established the language as the central tool of depiction. Nevertheless his language is used as a structure void of content which merely interchanges with itself. Mark Taylor-Batty and Julliete tayler-Batty consider the language of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as something of unique quality that amuses its reader like music does to its listeners. Beckett’s language is an amalgamation of components hardly found together in the identical narrative. It is gloomy, mysterious, round, opposing, full of aggressive details, violent fierceness and ironic, “terrifying insights into the meaninglessness of human life” His language is uneasy to understand for its overall wordiness by the trouble of the words and expressions. It is serious because it, chiefly, studies complex and strangely disastrous characters who cannot settle the incongruity of the perceived world with the realness of the unnoticed. Language is condensed by Beckett making it nothing other than a derelict castle whose yawning crashes let in the wind and rain. Beckett uses language to demonstrate the role of language for humans, the speech patterns of the characters: repeated vocabulary, pronoun changes, sound effects re-enforce the key themes and the diverse tone of the text. In other words, the comic effects of language used by characters poorly emphasize the themes of tediousness and absurdity that direct the texts. In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir is the character who fumbles for meaning, but the sense remains hidden.
Complexity of Language:
The discourse, between the characters, is sprinkled with words that are meaningless for ordinary people. Beckett makes it difficult to demonstrate which comes first, memory weakening or language significance, one clearly accompanies the other. Thus, in Luckey's case a distressed memory is blended with “partial aphasia and ultimately total silence”.
Despite the aphasia and stammering, there is some indication of a certain amount of speech collapse that are ellipsis and stammering which are noticeable in Pozzo’s speech from the stress of Vladimir’s criticism:
I can’t bear it…any longer…the way he goes on…you’ve no idea…it’s terrible…he must go…(he waves his arm)…I’m going mad (He collapses his head in his hands)…I can’t bear it…any longer…
Language significance such as these on the individual level is the mark of the general insufficiency of speech to manage diversity of circumstances and of the incoordination between speech and memory or thought. One of the key reasons of confusion among the characters proceeds from broken communication because of kinds of inaccuracy such as vagueness, misinterpreting a question, misperception of sounds, etc. Waiting for Godot unlocks on a vague note, “Nothing to be done,” that does not become a start of a dialogue into monologues- Estragon arguing his shoes, Vladimir their boring existence and their incapability to amend it. Beckett, in his use of language, highlights the imperfection of language as a medium for the finding and communication of abstract reality. The subjects of Waiting for Godot and other plays continue the trouble of discovering sense in a world subject to a ceaseless change, his use of language probes the limits of language both as a vehicle for the expression of effective statement- a tool of views or facts. The drama is entirely complete with duplication; without diversity or newness, and paradoxes with no firmness. Furthermore, apart from emulating the tedious circle of life, So many repetitions in the play serve the characters to busy themselves and pass the painful time less consciously. As a result Beckett uses language not as a heavenly device but as sheer meaningless buzzing. Language is used “in a world that has lost its meaning, language also becomes meaningless buzzing.
It is used like profound music heard for the first time as Niklaus Gessner in his The Inadequacy of Language, has arranged ten different ways of fragmentation of language; they range from simple misunderstanding and double - extenders to monologues, clichés, recurrences of substitutes, incapability to discover the exact words, and telegraphic mode to the farrago of disordered nonsense and the plummeting of punctuation marks, such as question marks as a sign that language has lost its task as a method for communication, that questions have turned into statements not really demanding a response. This pleasant sense is expressed in the irrational, and reasonable and incongruous actions of the characters or their reactions to the words.
Throughout the play there are several instances of a kind of discord between what a character says and what he does. In fact, what they say is, in a meaningless way, in conflict with what they do afterwards or what they have already done. As a result, the distinctiveness of Beckett's Plays is in his abnormal style of using ordinary people’s language. Ordinary conversation is quite evident in his active use of tautology, malapropism, spurious logic, verbal inconsistencies, improper grammar, which are quite strange with common-place conversation. In Beckett’s plays hollow sound effects that support the themes of horror and conversational emptiness. Staccato sound repetitions occur in such phrases as “Didi'' and in Vladimir’s lullaby which is composed of words “Do do do” and “Bye bye bye bye,” repeated several times. Therefore, the characters fail to communicate, and their use of language seems to become more and more unimportant.
Beckett seems to be saying that communication through silence and gesture as in the pantomime is just as real and perhaps more so than communication through the spoken word. Language is a form of reassurance, but not real linking happens, in its place language is a noise to fill the invalid created by the absence of eloquent human contact. Hence the presence of clichés in the discourse of the characters points toward the fact that in real life most verb exchanges are similarly empty of real communication. Repeated phrases, lines, words and the fact that the second act repeats the first act are used to signify the senseless repetition and relentless flow of time inherent to human existence. Right from the beginning, the characters repeat what they themselves have already said or each other's utterances and actions in quite a circular way. They keep on repeating things for many deadly times as if to signify that man's life does not exceed anywhere beyond a certain number of endlessly-repeated habitual deeds. The very phrase "Nothing to be done" is repeated four times, noticeably in the First Act. “The dialogue has the peculiar repetitive quality of the cross-talk comedians’ pattern". It also shows the issue of communication between humans, which worries Beckett Adamov and Ionesco. Like waiting, talking is part of their usual life. Without them, they cannot live. They talk so as to be able to live. Their conversation, in fact, eases the agonizing waiting which in turn is used as a painkiller to comfort the impossible life they live. The conversations between the characters of these writers are essentially an attempt to achieve contact. At the end they recognize the impossibility of such contacts, even through the conflict.
Beckett uses a language based on forms of tangible images rather than argument and expansive speech. And since language is trying to present a sense of being, it can neither investigate nor solve problems of behavior or ethics or communication. From the general devaluing of language in the flood of mass communication, the growing specialization of life has made the interchange of notions on a growing number of themes incredible between members of different spheres of life which has each developed his own specialized jargons. That is why communication between humans is often demonstrated in a state of breakdown. Esslin points out in this regard "language has run riot in an age of mass communication. It must be reduced to its function, the expression of reliable content, rather than its concealment”.
Uselessness of Language in Wasting Time:
Time is another recurring theme in the works of Samuel Beckett who regards it as an enemy that ruins people and carries them to their ultimate end that is death. So time and death are closely interrelated for him. He calls time “the double-headed monster of damnation and salvation”. Consequently, time figures as a destructive power in his works. Time is also treated as a void which needs to be filled up in verbal or non-verbal ways. In 'Waiting for Godot', the two tramps, Estragon and Vladimir who represent all humanity utter remarks that any one of us can utter. These two men speak to each other without understanding. They do this to keep busy. To pass time, they talk and talk about Godot, whom they really don’t know much about.
In Waiting for Godot, the subject of the play becomes an example of how to pass the time in a situation which offers no hope. Thus the theme of the play is set by the beginning:
Estragon: Nothing to be done
Vladimir: I’m beginning to come round to that opinion
Although the phrase is used in connection to Estragon’s boots here, it is also later used by Vladimir with respect to his hat. Essentially it describes the hopelessness of their lives.
Vladimir: What about trying them.
Estragon: I’ve tried everything. Vladimir: No, I mean the boots.
Estragon: Would that be a good thing?
Vladimir: It’d pass the time. I assure you, it’d be an occupation
Since passing the time is their mutual occupation, Estragon struggles to find games to help them accomplish their goal. Thus, they engage in insulting one another and in asking each other questions. They talk and talk about Godot, whom they really don’t know much about. On a road, beneath a tree ravaged by winter, in a barren, desolate place, they are waiting for Godot, but this gentleman will never come.
Self-Estrangement and Language:
Conclusion:
The significance of language is the outcome of various approaches in the Drama of the Absurd: the use of pointless words uttered mechanically with no logical relations or grammatical structure occurs in absurdist's works. These dramatists make little use of language as a means of influence. The circular structure of the play together with the paradoxical symmetries, which pervade the whole play, clearly prove that all the characters' yesterdays have been the same as today and that tomorrow will be no different from that. Therefore, the play in which the true meaning and the best formal representation of the absurd life of modern men are masterfully depicted. Beckett was occupied with the failure of language to communicate the dangers of life and its purposelessness.
Words - 2,404
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Video - 1
References -
Abbas , Abbas Mustafa. The Significance of Language in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. ResearchGate, Jan. 2015, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348923342_The_Significance_of_Language_in_Samuel_Beckett's_Waiting_for_Godot.
Knowlson, James. "Beckett, Samuel Barclay (1906–1989), author." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 09. Oxford University Press. Date of access 31 Mar. 2023, <https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-40453>
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