Waiting for Godot/WMG
Every staging of the play is in the same continuity
The second act has some vague similarities to the first, some of which are inexplicable. Offstage, these changes continue until not even Didi can remember the previous acts. This means that theoretically in between performances of the play the wait continues until not even Didi can remember the previous day's waits, and in between different stagings of the play the characters and setting slowly change to however they are performed next.
Thus ever since the play was first staged, they have been waiting. Every perfomance is part of the same long wait. And until the final performance of the play, they will still be waiting. And Godot will never show up.
Godot was kidnapped by Acheron Hades.
In the first Thursday Next book, Hades kidnaps one character from Martin Chuzzlewit and threatens to do the same to the main character. One character comments, "Can you imagine the other characters sitting around, waiting for a lead character who never appears?" This is the exact situation found in Waiting for Godot; thus, at some point, Godot became one of Hades's victims.
- Not necessarily Hades, but someone did. His head was found as part of a bootleg head-in-a-bag plot device.
- Moreover, Godot was Acheron's first victim. The play was written in French by an Irish ex-pat in France. Given the Brit-centric nature of the UK, Hades picked his trial victim from a French manuscript by an Irish writer because very few would be likely to notice or care.
Godot is an Ice Cream Truck...
This is why Estragon and Vladamir insist on waiting for him, and also why they aren't anything more than disappointed when he doesn't show up.
- Is he a vibrating ice cream truck?
Godot got lost and ended up in a DS game, instead of a book
And so, Estragon and Vladimir missed him, but Phoenix found him.
- On the one hand, "Godot" was just an alias for Mia's mentor post-coma, on the other the Ace Attorney series is a visual novel.
Godot doesn't exist
He is a figment of Vladimir and Estragon's vivid imaginations.
Godot was there all along.
Either as Vladimir or Estragon.
- or the tree
Godot is both Vladimir and Estragon.
Heinlein got it right. A dash of Time Travel here, a little plastic surgery there, and there you have it!
- There will be a sequel with three bums, one of them female...
- Tokyo Godfathers? Godot is a holy baby?
Vladimir, and Estragon represent the Id, and the Superego.
This goes along with them combined being Godot. Or Godot is the balanced Ego.
Godot was planning to murder the two.
Vladimir and Estragon were lucky that Godot overslept.
Or maybe...
Godot is Death.
Well, why not? Dimi and Esty exist solely to make some sort of philosophic point about the nature of human life, so why wouldn't the guy they're waiting for, whom they never meet, turn out to be the End of it? They say they wouldn't recognize him if they saw him, but they know that he's coming eventually, and they even seem a little afraid of him.
Godot = God
Similar to the above. Also, notice how Godot appears to be a cutesy French nickname for the Big Man.
- Beckett went on record as saying "If I had meant 'god', I would have said 'god'." The play was written in French, but the word Godot is derived from a slang term for "shoe". The play is mostly concerned with duality and symbiosis, secondarily with the question of what one is to do with life, and thirdly with the existence of God.
- You're using Word of God, claiming that not Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory (in this play?), to discount the presence of a god?
- Considering that the boy complains that Godot beats him on the first occasion, then says Godot is an awesome dude the second time he shows up, one can assume this is a metaphor for the difference between the God of the Old Testament and the benevolent God of the New Testament.
- He doesn't say that Godot is an awesome dude, he says that Godot 'does nothing'. So perhaps it's a metaphor for the interventionist God of ancient times and the silence of God in modern times.
- "Godot" doesn't mean shoe, I think. Beckett was Irish, and the phrase "Go Deo" in Irish (pronounced "Gu Dyo") means "forever". I always understood the title of the play to be "Waiting for Eternity"
Godot is Pozzo
When he initially shows up, Vladmir and Estragon ask if he is Godot,and he believes his self-importance would fit with a character of Godot's probable stature. He denies it, but given that Lucky used to do his thinking for him and doesn't anymore, it is plausible he forgot, especially since the other characters in the play are also highly forgetful. Also note the similar sounding names (pronounced Pot-so).
- In the first act, according to the boy, Godot is active (beating the boy's brother for example). In the second act, he does nothing. This quite clearly parallels Pozzo who is an active performer in the first act, but in the second act is blind, and so of course couldn't do anything.
Lucky wrote Finnegans Wake as a ghost writer for James Joyce
Lucky could have been an author before coming into Pozzo's service. If you read the text of Finnegans Wake and Lucky's monologue the connection is obvious.
Godot is love.
Really think about it for a minute.
Godot was there the whole time.
Why not, eh?
- (Some of) what follows is from "As Long As He Lies Perfectly Still", the first track on Side B of Soft Machine's second LP. In this song, instances of "he" refer to Kevin Ayers: Kevin having been a member of Soft Machine but only prior to The Soft Machine, Volume 2. (Does it seem pertinent the song references a person not present? Thank you for paying attention.) The song is crammed with elliptical in-jokes to be pondered by those familiar with Soft Machine's debut LP, including one line among the following:
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He's Pozzo and Lucky, Estragon and Vladimir |
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- It helps to imagine a happily-deranged drummer--with a Canterbury accent, in an angelic register--racing through each line as if the words barely fit the meter, which they don't. Uh, I meant "do". Robert Wyatt went on to write and perform his masterpiece, Rock Bottom, while recovering from a paralyzing spinal injury. (Not a joke. Sorry.) Rock Bottom appears to be entirely lacking in meaning. The astute reader may detect a pattern.
Godot just doesn't want to see Didi and Gogo
and he's making excuses - he may even be actively avoiding them. Or maybe he just can't be bothered with them. All this would eventually have been revealed if Beckett had just got around to writing the Perspective Flip version. Or maybe he did, and Godot just appears under a different name in it. Like Hamm. Or Krapp.
- Having chosen Beckett for a term paper--senior year in high school--a strait-laced young man ventured, oh-so-delicately, a hypothesis: the name "Krapp" might have been intended as scatological humor. An annotation (in red ink) later affixed, it said...well, it's difficult to recall precisely...something like, "Well, duh!" Atypical of the instructor's diction, Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness being his usual mode.
- A play called "Alias Godot" was written by a Canadian playwrite. It shows that Godot wasn't purposely late... he was arrested by two crooked bumbling cops who are extremely similar to Didi and Gogo.
Vladimir and/or Estragon are in purgatory or hell.
Godot never arrives, and the other waiter may not exist.
Godot gets there right after the play ends.
He overslept by a few minutes, didn't realize his schedule was off, and missed the bus. It was either wait for the next bus or walk, and he chose... poorly.
Godot was waiting for Vladimir and Estragon.
Godot is a shoe.
A private eye as well, and therefore a gumshoe, but first and foremost a shoe. A brown dress shoe, about four feet tall. With laces.
Godot is a one-legged man.
The duality themes, the origin of his name, Vladimir and Estragon (two people) v. Godot (one person).
Godot is a penis.
See the guess directly above, but put your mind in the gutter and keep the phrase "three-legged man" in mind.
Waiting for Godot has no meaning. At all.
Waiting for Godot is a vicious attack on literary circles by providing a play that has a bunch of mysterious language, an odd situation and no visceral enjoyment (clever repartee or sword fights, for example), daring English Majors all over the world to go on and try to give it meaning!
- Beckett once said of one of his plays (I think it was Endgame) that it wasn't about anything, but it was the sort of thing something would be about, which seems to be the Existentialist way of admitting that yes, it's meaningless.
- This makes sense. At one point in the action of Endgame, Hamm nudges the fourth wall, saying in a panicked manner that he and Clov were starting to mean something, that if someone were to come by and see them, they'd think they meant something.
- Beckett once said of one of his plays (I think it was Endgame) that it wasn't about anything, but it was the sort of thing something would be about, which seems to be the Existentialist way of admitting that yes, it's meaningless.
The play's "events" (or lack of same) repeat themselves imperfectly
- In whatever void they inhabit, their memories of the past rapidly degrade. Vladimir thinks he must have seen Pozzo before, and must have seen the boy before, because he did. He and Estragon will see them again, and again, and again, never in quite the same way. There are three questions, though:whether this is Hell, or some sort of Groundhog Day Loop, what lies beyond the boundaries of the area in which they wait, and whether there's any course of action that could break the cycle.
Godot is Santa.
They're waiting for someone who may or may not exist. And also, the tree. At first, it has no leaves. The second day, it suddenly has several. Why? Easy: It's a christmas tree, and it's been decorated accordingly.
- Godot is Satan. The tree doesn't burn, because it's the one bearing the fruit which always blows just out of Tantalus' reach.
Godot is a Time Lord.
He was there the whole time in his TARDIS, which was the tree.
Godot is Godot.
His trials running a bit long. He'll make it as soon as he can.
It's a psychological experiment involving an alternate universe.
Godot is actually watching Didi and Gogo the whole time, and Pozzo and Lucky are Didi and Gogo from an alternate universe, maybe some kind of mirror universe.
Godot is a Zany Priest who performs...
...Gay marriages! Well think about it, everyone loves Waiting for Godot Ho Yay, and Didi and Gogo have just been together all their life. Now obviously they were very nochalant about the marriage proposal, if you just take a look at how incredibly nonchalant they were about hanging themselves...And then they'll go on that 'honeymoon' Or not, because Godot got, like, stabbed or something. Who knows?
Godot is a Troll.
Who has made these two random men his current victims. Problem?