M.A English Part 2 Notes | Waiting For Godot Notes
Question : Waiting for Godot presents not an isolated in a corner of France or Ireland but a cosmic condition.
Answer :
Samuel Beckett was born on a Good Friday, the 13th April, 1906 at Dublin. After obtaining M.A. degree, he lectured in English at the Eerale Normal Superior in Paris and in. France at T.CD from 1930 to 1932. Then he gave, left the teaching profession and finally settled in Paris in 1937. This detail tells us about his attachment with Ireland and France.
During the second World War Beckett took an active part in the French Resistance for nearly two years and then he went underground for about two and a half years to save himself from Gestapo (the secret German police). Few years of his age, which.he spent in the French Resistance had left deep impression on his character. He and his wife Suzanne were running around and -were trying to find an exit through .the German occupied France. After crossing into unoccupied France, they reached a village high in the mountains.
During his stay in the German-occupied territory, he felt very much annoyed with the Nazi treatment of the Jews among whom he had many friends. He had been himself working as a French peasant to earn money and pass time. He had been experiencing of living close to death in this duration. These hard experiences of his life, he could project in various characters, which he has created in his literary works.
On the end of the World War II Beckett returned to his old apartment in 1945. This was the advent of his most productive and creative works; when he wrote a series of novels. All of them gave him name and fame throughout the literary world.
There have been many writers, who have been writing in a language other than their own. If they wrote i!i any foreign language, it was due to some circumstances, which compelled them. They were forced to quit their countries on account of political and ideological reasons. Beckett, for that reason was not an exile. His mother tongue is a very much accepted lingua franca of the twentieth century. He wrote all his master-pieces in French which spread his fame far and wide especially when he wrote Molloy in 1951. But "Waiting for Godot" which he "wrote in 1952, and staged in 1953 really created a stir.
Though it was labelled as undramatic by many critics, but it was considered as one of the greatest success of the post-war theatre. It won him the Nobel Prize. This tragicomedy ran for four hundred performances at the Theatre De Babylon. The play was translated into more than twenty languages, thought it is so exasperating, so complex and so uncompromising to any of basic principles of dramatic construction.
The play was little changed ill the 1970s from what it was on the day, it was first performed 1953. It became a tragic comedy play about a mysterious world where two men wait. Only a part of human race experienced the German occupation of France. "But everyone, everywhere, has waited and wondered, why he waited. This shows the universal quality of the play. We have all waited, perhaps not by a tree in the evening or on a country road, but waited. The details are immaterial. The tramps are waiting for Godot. Each of us has had his Godot, if only some one from whom, for several days, we had expected a letter, the substance of the play, in short, is as common experience as we can think of.