Waiting for Godot, the life under pious principles.

                In The Gay Science (1882) and Twilight of the idols (1889), Nietzsche give us his conception of the relation between humanity and religion, existence and religion. I want to explore here how the drama “Waiting for Godot”, of Samuel Beckett can be read as an illustration of the ideas of Nietzsche about existence.

First, let us try to sum up “Waiting for Godot”. In this play, two characters, Estragon and Vladimir are waiting for a so called “Godot”, discussing without having nothing to say. 

During the whole play, they try not to be bored by the life. Of course, Godot never comes and the two characters cannot move away because they are waiting for him, but on the other hand they have nothing to do where they are, and the whole drama takes place in this sort of stillness. The same story repeats itself two days a row, and nothing changes.

Death through waiting.

This Play can be related with Nietzsche’s ideas about religion. Indeed, we cannot prevent us of seeing a strange similarity between Godot and God, this being we are waiting all life long, without knowing if he will come one day. The characters do not really know what Godot looks like, when he will come, they are not even sure the place there are is the right place of meeting. All these characteristics allow us to think that Godot can be seen as an allegory of God.  Then we have to see what Gogo and Didi are doing, waiting for God. One of the most important idea of Beckett’s play is that conversations, as the lives of the characters, are empty; the only thing they can do is to wait. Life is not more life, in that sense that Estragon and Vladimir do not have vital impulse, they speak to fight boredom, they have argue not to see the time flowing. The best example of this non-life state is that when Estragon says “What about hang ourselves?” Vladimir answers “Hum, It’d give us an erection”. One sentence of Twilight of the Idols can perfectly summarize this situation: “Life has come to an end where the “kingdom of God” begins”. There is no more life in the two characters relation, because they are waiting for God.

Passions: something forbidden.  

And the relation between the two authors does not stop here. We have now to think about passions and feelings in the story. What can strike the spectator of the drama is that no one really have passions. The characters do not allow them to feel something. Vladimir says at once “You would make me laugh, if that was allowed”, this sentence can lead us to introduce two ideas of Nietzsche. The first is the idea that religion and consequently Church are deadly hostile to sensuality. The state of religious waiting that are living Estragon and Vladimir does not allow them to feel anything, they have to follow moral principles that kill feelings. The second idea we can see in this little sentence, is the fact that Nietzsche calls “the condemnation pronounced by the condemned”; following the moral direction of religion is a choice of men. In the story, they are waiting for Godot because they have chosen it, and not because they are obligated to do this!

And we can say that religion does a good job, our characters do not have passions anymore. They experience some little feelings which go away as fast as they went. Sadness and anger are brief and Gogo and Didi skip it quickly.

The end of passions comes with the end of thought.  

To conclude and to overcome the previous theses, I would like to speak about thought in Waiting for Godot, because this area is maybe the only which cannot be considered in Nietzsche’s perspective. Indeed, in Twilight of the idols, we can read that the religion kills life because Nietzsche considers that life is feeling, but religion does not kill thought. And S. Beckett go further since he breaks the thought in his play. The thoughts of characters are not really interesting and their only value is to help to spend time. The best example of this idea is Lucky’s tirade in the first act, when he answers to the order “now think”. This monologue is a four pages text, without any dot, without any comma, and of course without any sense. The thought is here destructed, as if the last wall which separated man and nothingness had been destroyed. Which this tirade, men die even more strongly.

To conclude, we can say that this absurd play show maybe better the absurdity of life under a religious principle than the texts of Nietzsche because it gives us a good example of how awkward can be the relations of two men that are already dead.