Talk:Waiting for Godot

What do the Philistines Think?

Waiting for Godot is the archetypical example of nonsense displacing sense in the 20th century. It forms a neat triangle, with nonsense painting (Picasso) and nonsense books (Finnegan's Wake) at the other corners. In the manner of a prosecuting attorney, I put it to the artistic community that the above items are no better than those random patterns within which the human mind often finds (due to ancient evolutionary pressures) some sort of illusory image or meaning. Having done so, there is then a battle, between differing interpretations, in which the only rule is never to suggest that everyone has been 'taken for a ride'. The item may then 'go viral' in the modern parlance and, particularly in the case of paintings, soon acquires a sky-rocketing monetary value which forever cements it firmly in place. I note that this cultural racket has already been neatly outed by H.C.Andersen (Emperor's New Clothes) and S.L.Clemens (The Royal Nonesuch), but is it not about time for a more robust attack to be made on this blatant artistic scam? A successful assault might even go viral. 78.145.10.148 (talk) 15:38, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

Spot on....!!! El Mostarzo Perrito (talk) 14:18, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

Character Analysis section (currently) takes too much at face value

Something to note is that this play is full of characters who's words cannot be taken at face-value. I'm writing this talk page post because one sentence from the section on Vladimir and Estragon caught my eye, suggesting that Vladimir and Estragon "[...] have been together for fifty years but when asked by Pozzo they do not reveal their actual ages", but it's noted that this is not stated as fact. The characters often overblow numbers in their conversation, so nothing can be taken at face value. Vladimir does *tell* Estragon they've been together for around fifty years, but he also suggests that the 90s were "a million years ago" (in a play that takes place in no specific time period at all, and was written in the 50s). In addition to the unreliableness of their non-stop sarcasm, they regularly both show that their memory is somewhat unreliable, and are slightly narcissistic. This is true of all three main characters... Pozzo, Vladimir, and Estragon.

My point is that we cannot take as fact anything they say in the entire course of the show. They clearly have some lengthy bond, but it could be as brief as a week or two.

Furthermore, it's revealed that the characters, who act as though they've never met Pozzo and Lucky, have met them at least once previously, despite no one remembering each other (or at least pretending not to remember each other). And so on. My point, again, is that we cannot take anything stated as fact about these characters, even though it makes for a more ambiguous Wikipedia entry. We truly don't even know their names... no one ever says "Vladimir" or "Estragon" in the entire play. They are only referred to as "Didi" and "Gogo" between the two of them, and as "Adam" and "Abraham" when others are in their midst. So, truly... do we even know their names?

IndigoHatter (talk) 16:54, 20 March 2025 (UTC)