Waiting for Godot

Beckett's Life

 Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1906.

 He was the second son of a middle class family who were Protestants in a society that was predominantly Catholic.

 He had the opportunity to pursue an excellent education and went to Trinity College in Dublin to study French and Italian.

 After graduating, he took up a job as an English teacher in Paris. He returned to Ireland in 1931 to lecture in French literature, and then worked on his Masters degree in French at Dublin University.

 He later returned to Paris, again as a teacher, in 1932, and remained there for the rest of his life with the exception of a few visits abroad.

 In World War II, he was part of the Resistance Movement and later joined the Red Cross.

 Teaching did not appeal to Beckett's creative spirit, and he started concentrating most of his efforts on his writing.

 He first started writing critical studies (in the 1930s and 1940s), poems, and novels, all in English.

 A few years later, he started writing in French, at a time when he had rejected Ireland as his homeland.

 Like many other famous Irish expatriates, he explained that he could not tolerate the strict censorship that predominated so many aspects of life in Ireland, particularly the censorship of literature by the Catholic clergy.

 He also added that the unstable political situation in Ireland at the time was not conducive to intellectual and creative production.

 He did not allow some of his plays to be presented in Ireland, even after he became famous. In 1958, a play showing in the International Dublin Theater Festival by his colleague was banned and Beckett withdrew his plays in protest.

His Works

 Beckett virtually created the term "the theatre of the absurd" with the appearance of En Attendant Godot: Waiting for Godot) in Paris in 1953.

 The literary world was so shocked by the appearance of a drama so different and yet so intriguing.

 The entire group of dramas which developed out of this type of theater is always associated with the name of Beckett. He is thus considered the master of the genre of the theater of the absurd.

 The unusual aspect about this movement is that it has never had any clear philosophical doctrines and never organized meetings to win converts. Each of its main playwrights seems to have developed independently of what the others were doing.

 The theater of the absurd generally presents

o surprising and fantastic plays with no coherently developed situations, no logic of motivation and reaction, where the external world is often seen as menacing and unknown.

o The settings of such drama do not seem to bear an obvious relationship to the drama as a whole; language ceases to be a tool of communication, and the cause-and-effect relationships found in traditional dramas cease to exist.

o The audience gradually becomes used to a new kind of relationship between theme and presentation; they feel a vague sense of discomfort at a world which is presented as incoherent and frightening,