Time Future and Time Present

in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”

P. D. DUBBE

A great play is one which shows us a completely new view of universe, something that leads us into unknown territory in language and music, which is startling and revealing and shows us new possibilities for expression and at the same time in some ways, failure or vernacular to convey meaning. Waiting for Godot is a great play on this level. It shows us something about life that we did not know before on the stage, or show us something about music, that we had not heard before. And this sort of imaginative discovery that we can have.

The act of waiting for Godot is shown as essentially absurd what is absurd is human existence. Why is it absurd? Because being human and existing are mutually contradictory–one could be a human being if one did have to exist, and one could exist, though not as a human being. But one cannot exist, and be a human being, in the same place, at the same time. Estragon keeps forgetting that and wanting to go, and each time Vladimir has to stop him. They have the same exchange of line each time like a refrain “Let’s go, we can’t. Why not? We’re waiting for Godot.”

They wait for Godot both days that we see them and they are going to come back to wait for him again the next day, and no doubt the day after that and we can be fairly sure they were waiting for him on the previous day and the day before that. Godot will never come but they will never be sure that he is not coming because there will always seems to be some reason for hoping that he will come tomorrow. And there’ll always be the possibility that he came today.

The subject of the play is how to pass the time, given the fact that the situation is hopeless. At the end of Godot, Vladimir says the same thing more badly and with the whole weight of the play behind him. Habit is a great deadener. By then he and Estragon have had two hours on stage to prove it. Although there are moments in the play when the suffering of being has pierced them both, neither comment on them when Vladimir tries to laugh he stops immediately, his fact convulsed, when the Boy comes to tell them Godot won’t appear that evening Estragon attack him then relapses covering his face with his hands; when he drops his hands his face is convulsed. The rest is mostly ritual, filling the emptiness and silence. “It’ll pass the time” explains Vladimir, offering to tell the story of the crucifixion the hope, the habit of hoping that Godot might come, after all, is the last illusion that keeps Vladimir and Estragon from facing the human condition and themselves in the hoarse light of fully conscious awareness for a brief moment, Vladimir is aware of the full horror of human condition.

In the second act, when Pozzo and Lucky reappear, cruelly deformed by the action of time, Vladimir and Estragon again have their doubts whether they are the same people they meet the previous day.

But the two tramps are two parts of a person or of a community seen subjectively with Vladimir representing the more animal, and that Pozzo and Lucky make up a person or a community viewed objectively Pozza being the exploiter and user of ideas, Lucky the exploited and the creator of ideas. In other words we suffer with Estragon and Vladimir, their fears, their hopes, their hatreds and loves, but we view Pozzo and Lucky though their eyes and therefore see in them only the social surface of life. These four characters should add up to a picture of humanity large.

Waiting is to experience the action of time which is constant change. And yet, as nothing real ever happens, that change is in itself an illusion. The clashless activity of time is self-defeating, purposeless, and therefore null and void. The more things change the more they are the same. That is the terrible stability of the world. “The tears of the world are a constant quantity for each one who begins to weep, somewhere else stops.” “One day is like another, and when we die we might never have existed.” As Pozza explains in his great final outburst.

“Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time? The line is Pozzo’s but it could as well be spoken by any of the other three characters in the play. Time is the common enemy. To Pozzo it brings only privation and decay; he loses in its course his pipe, his vaporizer, his watch, his sight, his dignity and his pride. To Lucky it brings no relief from his slavery, except that in the second act he seems to have lost the power to speak. To Didi (Vladimir) and Gogo (Estragon) it brings only frustration and occasionally a brief interlude in their otherwise tedious waiting for the promised one. “That passed the time” says Didi after the departure of Pozzo and Lucky in the first act. Characteristically, Gogo attempts to restrain Didi’s modest effort to see life as more than unrelievedly burdensome.

The two propose various stratagems for passing time. They try to converse calmly, but the conversation declines to intolerable silence–intolerable because it leaves each alone with his thoughts, and to think is “misery.” But even here time is against them, for, as Vladimir observes, “What is terrible is to have thought.”

Waiting for Godot presents to us the image of that kind of existence which is radically, absolutely dependent for its significance upon time future, upon that which is about to be: which is to say, it is a play about existence. For existence, human being in time, has its value or worthwhileness corroborated only by events which are yet to appear. The significance of the present can be apprehended only when present events are translated into the past. Only then can one say, “Ah, yes.” Now it is clear that such a decision was right or wrong, for these later events have shown it to be so.

If it is necessary, then to identify Godot in some special way, we may begin by saying that Godot is simply Time Future. He is arriving at every instant of time, of course, but as soon as he passes the barrier between Time Future and Time Present, he is no longer Godot but someone or something else. Pozzo and Lucky, for example, or the Boy. And the Boy speaks truly, in his account of Godot. “Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won’t come this evening but surely tomorrow.”

Godot will not come this evening because, this “evening” is now. He will come “tomorrow” and will come all future tomorrows because tomorrow is Time Future. To be tomorrow is not to be today; to be future is not to be present. Since Godot is Time Future, he cannot be Time Present, so while he is always on the way he can never arrive.

Godot can then be summed up in phrases such as “The Future Ground” or “possible Absolute.” But as either Future or possible, he is not and cannot be present and Actual; and if he cannot be present and Actual, then he who waits for him can never have that sure and certain Ground which he is waiting and longing for as the authorization of his being and the validation of his time. Hence Godot and his decision is an event which will forever dangle before the two men, like the carrot before the donkey. Estragon, “I’ll never forget this carrot”, leading them, that is to the “place”, which is the border between Time Present and Time Future, between what is and what may be.

The moments of stage time are, then, like compartments of equal size, and these compartments must be “filled” with the sort of goings on whose character it is to be so lively, interesting, distracting, that the audience is unaware that time is passing, the careful playwright will do all he can to make “stage time” so significant that the audience will forget its own, “natural” time. The successful play, is the one which manages to make the audience forget itself, lose itself in the play, lose its time in “stage time.” And that is the play Waiting for Godot.

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