Is Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" a criticism of Christianity?
Is Samuel Beckett's

Author: Johannes Viertel

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2019-07-10

Total Pages: 17

ISBN-13: 3668978158

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Essay from the year 2015 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,7, University of Hildesheim (Institut für englische Sprache und Literatur), course: Literature - From Modernism to Postmodernism, language: English, abstract: In this essay care is taken specifically to the role and the criticism of Christianity. Since many studies came to the conclusion that the piece deals mainly with the topic of Christianity, with large influxes of philosophy and existential questions, a broad range of theories and conjectures has developed in this regard. In the course of this work I will first give a general overview of the most important references and criticisms of Christianity, oriented to the text, will then have a closer look at the role of Pozzo and Lucky and will present my conclusion at the end. The play “Waiting for Godot” premiered 1953 and was written by the Irish novelist Samuel Beckett. It is divided into two acts and the main characters, two old men called Vladimir and Estragon, wait on a lonely country road for a man called Mr. Godot. While waiting they are talking, one could say speculate, about that person, contemplate suicide several times, talk about religion and meet several characters but neither of these is Mr. Godot. This was just a very simple representation of events, another response of what happens might be “it depends what you mean by “happen””. In the fifty years since the plays publication many authors have tried to determine the meaning of this play. It seems like there is no specific meaning behind the text and that a new meaning is created each time the text is read. Therefor the text invites the reader to search for an interpretation, a meaning, a sense or message, even though it is not immediately visible. One thus has to accept that there is no right or wrong, only an assumption. With this knowledge it is possible to examine the text at various levels, such as political, religious, biographical, psychoanalytical or even existential.

Samuel Beckett and the Question of God in Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett and the Question of God in Waiting for Godot

Author: Patricia Patkovszky

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2009-01-30

Total Pages: 38

ISBN-13: 3640256247

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, Humboldt-University of Berlin (Department of English and American Studies), course: 20th - Century Drama, 12 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: On 5 January 1953 'Waiting for Godot' challenged its first theaters audience with a never seen dramatic work of art, radically different from anything shown before, the title "referring ironically to the nonappearance of the person awaited so faithfully by the two main protagonists". Before Beckett, drama was synonymous with action: a plot in which barely anything happens was inconceivable. Beckett is the first dramatist to focus exclusively on the act of waiting and to make this into his dominant metaphor for existence. He, at he same time, expects his audience to share that experience of waiting with Estragon and Vladimir. As Martin Esslin pointed out in 1961: "Beckett is trying to capture the basic experience of being 'in the world', having been thrust into it without a by-your-leave, and having, somehow, to come to terms with 'being there', 'Dasein' itself, in Heidegger's sense". Vladimir and Estragon, two tramps, are the main characters of the play. They perform on an empty stage, marked only by a single tree and a low mound, waiting for the appearance of a mysterious character named Godot. Two other men, Pozzo and Lucky, master and servant, turn up and stay with them for a while. To pass their time, they discuss their bodily handicaps, their non-fitting clothes and episodes of their life together as well as questions of theology. Godot, however, never comes; but a boy delivers the message, that he will be there the next day. Vladimir and Estragon consider leaving and even committing suicide, but they fail in doing so. Nearly the same events take place during the second act. Godot never comes and the story kind of repeats itself. Since the first performance of the play people

Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot

Author: Samuel Beckett

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2011-04-12

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 9780802198822

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From an inauspicious beginning at the tiny Left Bank Theatre de Babylone in 1953, followed by bewilderment among American and British audiences, Waiting for Godot has become of the most important and enigmatic plays of the past fifty years and a cornerstone of twentieth-century drama. As Clive Barnes wrote, “Time catches up with genius … Waiting for Godot is one of the masterpieces of the century.” The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone—or something—named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree, inhabiting a drama spun of their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as mankind’s inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett’s language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existential post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time.

Still: Samuel Beckett's Quietism
Still: Samuel Beckett's Quietism

Author: Wimbush Andy

Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand

Published: 2020-06-18

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 3838213696

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the 1930s, a young Samuel Beckett confessed to a friend that he had been living his life according to an ‘abject self-referring quietism’. Andy Wimbush argues that ‘quietism’—a philosophical and religious attitude of renunciation and will-lessness—is a key to understanding Beckett’s artistic vision and the development of his career as a fiction writer from his early novels Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Murphy to late short prose texts such as Stirrings Still and Company. Using Beckett’s published and archival material, Still: Samuel Beckett’s Quietism shows how Beckett distilled an understanding of quietism from the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, E.M. Cioran, Thomas à Kempis, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and André Gide, before turning it into an aesthetic that would liberate him from the powerful literary traditions of nineteenth-century realism and early twentieth-century high modernism. Quietism, argues Andy Wimbush, was for Beckett a lifelong preoccupation that shaped his perspectives on art, relationships, ethics, and even notions of salvation. But most of all it showed Beckett a way to renounce authorial power and write from a position of impotence, ignorance, and incoherence so as to produce a new kind of fiction that had, in Molloy’s words, the ‘tranquility of decomposition’.

Christ's Wait for Godot
Christ's Wait for Godot

Author: Stephen D. Morrison

Publisher: Beloved Publishing LLC

Published: 2021-02-23

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 9781631741791

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Often bleak and blasphemous, Samuel Beckett's writing is not commonly considered a source of spiritual courage and theological depth, but "Christ's Wait for Godot" finds much to admire in Beckett's grey world. Stephen D. Morrison leverages his expertise in Jürgen Moltmann's theology to read Beckett with a theologian's eye and discover many surprising parallels. By also gleaning from the insights of Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the mystical and apophatic traditions, Morrison arrives at a highly original reading of Beckett that is at once comforting and challenging. Most critics studying Beckett's religious themes fail to reckon with the strength of his spiritual sensibilities. But there is tremendous metaphysical depth to Beckett's obsession with suffering, protest, longing, and hope. Morrison strives to uncover new ways of reading Beckett's work by taking his spiritual sensibilities seriously and reading him theologically. The result is a book at once hopeful and honest. In the end, it is Beckett's humanity that impresses us the most. And in these uncertain times, we need writers who courageously wrestle with God, truth, and meaning.

Theology of Samuel Beckett
Theology of Samuel Beckett

Author: John Calder

Publisher: Alma Books

Published: 2018-01-01

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 0714545554

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Like all the greatest writers, Samuel Beckett was primarily interested in discovering the meaning and purpose of life and of the world into which we are born. Knowledgeable about the religion his family and education instilled in him, which as an adult he could neither accept nor reject, he used it extensively in his novels, plays and poetry. Beckett's works also explored philosophy and the imaginative world of Dante and Milton, as well as the theories of Darwin and scientific speculation, in order to create a literature that investigates human destiny more deeply and originally than any other writer had done before.In this, his second book about the essence and depth of Samuel Beckett's thinking and literary art, John Calder analyses the dualism of Beckett's theological writing, his debt to the Gnostics, Manichaeism and Geulincx in particular, the presence of ghosts in his work, and why his late writing has received so little attention compared to the early and middle periods. It will open up the much underestimated Beckett to deeper understanding and provide enjoyment to the many who have become convinced that this once derided author is one of the major literary figures of his time.

Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot

Author: Mark Taylor-Batty

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-06-13

Total Pages: 125

ISBN-13: 1441156100

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"An impressively complete survey of the play in its cultural, theatrical, historical and political contexts." - David Bradby, co-editor of Contemporary Theatre Review Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is not only an indisputably important and influential dramatic text -it is also one of the most significant western cultural landmarks of the twentieth century. Originally written in French, the play first amazed and appalled Parisian theatre-goers and critics before receiving a harshly dismissive initial critical response in Britain in 1955. Its influence since then on the international stage has been significant, impacting on generations of actors, directors and audiences.

The Omnipresent Emptiness in Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot"
The Omnipresent Emptiness in Samuel Beckett's

Author: Saskia Bachner

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2008-08

Total Pages: 90

ISBN-13: 3640136977

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,6, University of Mannheim, language: English, abstract: Incomprehension and confusion are common reactions to the plays of Samuel Beckett. The effort of the audience to extract an overall meaning from the plot mostly fails. This is due to the fact that on the stage, all concepts on which we usually rely collapse; they lose their meaning. Among them are for instance "the belief in God, in the unity of the world, [and] in the knowability of experience" (Connor, 3). The audience is no longer able to revert to familiar experiences in order to establish an interpretation. The result is inner emptiness. According to Beckett and the other writers of the so-called Theatre of the Absurd, inner emptiness is a basic experience of everyday life. Against the background of the events of the Second World War, they believe that our world is characterised by dissolution (cf. Esslin 1991, 43). The concepts in which we believe have merely become illusions. We cling to them in order to avoid the truth: we are left alone in an empty world. Beckett shares this opinion with several philosophical areas. Nevertheless, he is clearly no philosopher. Beckett himself emphasises that "he never understood the distinction between being and existence" (P. J. Murphy quoted in Barfield, 155). However, this does not seem to be entirely true since he includes these terms as well as the philosophical problem of the inner emptiness in his work. Yet, unlike Sartre and Camus, Beckett does not present a solution to this problem (cf. Cormier & Pallister, 3f). Nonetheless, Martin Esslin states that philosophical problems are in general better expressed by the plays of the Theatre of the Absurd than by the plays or novels of Sartre and Camus. In contrast to the latter, the Theatre of the Absurd does not only illustrate emptiness in the content of the plot, but also in the form of the play itse

Gale Researcher Guide for: Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot
Gale Researcher Guide for: Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot

Author: Chris Ackerley

Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning

Published:

Total Pages: 11

ISBN-13: 1535852232

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Gale Researcher Guide for: Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.