Critically analyse Samuel Beckett's handling of Memory and time in Waiting for Godot.

Critically analyse Samuel Beckett's handling of Memory and time in Waiting for Godot.

Trapped in the all pervading nothingness, the creatures of the absurd universe have lost their sense of memory and time. Beckett’s setting for ‘Waiting for Godot’ mentions only ‘A country road, A Tree, Evening.’ Thus the play is thrown into a great void – a vacuum which cannot be enclosed by memory and time. Beckett’s time-purpose in the play is definitely to show the futility of human existence.

Time is organically linked and they constitute a continuum. But in Beckett’s contrapuntal dramaturgy memory and time – the two co-ordinates of human experience are in tensions. Time seems to be virtually non-existence for the space bound tramps. With only the haziest fragments of memory and no future prospects, they seem to exist in a static perpetual present.

All things change. Only we can’t. Nonetheless, imprisoned as they are in a static situation, their immediate concern, as well as a central concern of the play as a whole, is time – that ‘double-headed’ monster of damnation and salvation as Beckett says in his Proust.

Time is at once the main source of the tramps’ hope and despair. Their only certainty, as Vladimir says, “is that hours are long under these conditions and constraints us to beguile them with proceeding which may at first sight seem reasonable until they become a habit.”  In other words, time has become a habit for them and we are told – a little later – is a great deadener. This time, like the tramps improvised proceedings, is repetitive cyclical – an existential prison house from which there is no escape..............................................................................

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Milan Tomic

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