Religion In Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot

The Relevance of Religion in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot Religion is a way to combat despair, tragedy, trauma, or the everyday life; it is essentially a wonderful means of hope. However many people after World War Two began to question the importance of religion. Samuel Beckett wrote the play, Wait For Godot, during the twentieth century, a time where Absurdism thrived. The play conveys messages of time, duality, and choices. Although Beckett utilizes religion throughout the play, there are other themes that people rarely discuss due to the audience easily discovering the religious message of the play. Despite the constant religious allusions, religion does not need to have relevance in finding a meaning in the play. Time is a subject

Time presents a slew of problems in Waiting for Godot. The very title of the play reveals its central action: waiting. The two main characters are forced to whittle away their days while anticipating the arrival of a man who never comes. Because they have nothing to do in the meantime, time is a dreaded barrier, a test of their ability to endure. Because they repeat the same actions every day, time is cyclical. That every character seems to have a faulty memory further complicates matters; time loses meaning when the actions of one day have no relevance or certainty on the next. The concept also plays a role thematically and structurally, but only together can they promote and exemplify the playwright’s message. Beckett incorporates duality into many aspects of the play structurally, because one can see that the play itself is divided into two acts, a clear indication of duality, not only the number, but because of the difference between how the characters act in the scene itself. The only differences between the tree setting in each act would be that when in act two, “ The tree has four or five leaves”(37). This

Waiting for Godot is a prime example of what has come to be known as the theater of the absurd. The play is filled with nonsensical lines, wordplay, meaningless dialogue, and characters who abruptly shift emotions and forget everything, ranging from their own identities to what happened yesterday. All of this contributes to an absurdist humor throughout the play. However, this humor is often uncomfortably mixed together with tragic or serious content to make a darker kind of comedy, which then causes a discomforting effect on the audience, who is not sure how to react to this absurd mixture of comedy and tragedy, seriousness and playfulness. The absurdity causes the seeming mismatch between characters ' tones and the content of their speech, which can be seen as a reaction to a world emptied of meaning and significance. If the world is meaningless, it makes no sense to see it as comic or tragic, good or bad. Beckett thus presents an eerie play that sits uneasily on the border between tragedy and comedy, in territory one can only call the