Samuel Beckett
He was the
prominent ure of the theatre of Absurd, he was a
playwright and a novelist, lived mainly in Paris and wrote both in French and in
English. His famous play: Waiting For Godot disrupted the existing conventions
of the theatre. Its characteristics consist in a combination of Absurd and
illogical situations in a realistic language. What happens in the play is not
arranged in a plot or in a chronological sequence. The characters
: two tramps are sad, but they provoke laughter.
They spend
their time waiting a certain Godot (this name could suggest God) who never
arrives as the critic Martin Erslin wrote: the subject of the play is not Godot
but waiting, because the act of waiting represents an essential aspect of human
condition in fact in our life we always wait for something (Godot is the symbol
of our waiting), an event, a person, death . It is in the act of waiting that we
realize the flow of time (in fact if we are active we tend to forget that time
seems never to pass) Becket wrote other plays such as: Endgame, Krapp's
last-tape and Happy days, and some novels: Molloy, Malone Meurt and The
Unnameable (which like his plays express a pessimistic vision of life: men have
few possibilities to escape their destiny, the life is purposeless and he can
only survive waiting for something that never comes). He wrote in French to
render his farm neat and essential (without indulging in embellishment or in
the use of words for their own sake). He received the Nobel Prize for
literature in 1969.
