Vladimir-Estragon Episode or Vladimir and Estragon Relationship in Beckett's Waiting for Godot

Vladimir and Estragon Relationship

Vladimir and Estragon, the joint protagonists in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot are two tramps, voluntary exiles from all human contacts. A boy appears on the scene and addresses Vladimir as Mr. Albert; Estragon tells the audience that he is Adam. Later Vladimir and Estragon introduce themselves as Didi and Gogo respectively. In an Absurd drama such fantasy and mystification are quite natural.

“Vladimir and Estragon", says Martin Esslin, “have complementary personalities.” They are the heroes or precisely antiheroes of the play, for unlike the heroes of the Greek or Shakespearean tragedies, they do not command our respect or admiration; at best they evoke our compassion. Yet they had their past.

“In the nineties",' says Vladimir, "hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first. We were respectable in those days. Now it's too late. They wouldn't even let us up." When told by Vladimir that Estragon “should have been a poet", he replies that he was a poet.

But later both of them were on the platform. They have lost their moorings, all local ties, their hearth and home. Their common platform is that they have no grass roots. Now that they have been thrown together and have a common cause, i.e. Waiting for Godot, they are extremely friendly in spite of occasional tiffs and misunderstanding. Estragon is timid and mentally feeble, and needs somebody to look after him. Vladimir becomes his guardian without pontifical solemnity.

Estragon dreams, for by dreaming he can withdraw from the alien and hostile world. His boots constantly pinch him, and he whines like a child. Once he had thrown himself into a river to put an end to his dreary existence, and Vladimir rescued him. He waits for God not so much for spiritual salvation as for some material benefit. Vladimir, however, is serious about salvation. He has only one mental weakness, his hat constantly pricks him. Estragon wants to forget his past as well as the stark reality. Vladimir faces the reality.

Both Vladimir and Estragon have to share the intolerable boredom of waiting. Vladimir is a widely read man. He knows Latin and has read the Old Testament as well as the New with avid care. Estragon does not seem to have read the Bible, and, therefore, does not know that what the four Evangelists have said about the redemption and damnation of the two thieves, crucified by the side of Christ on Mount Calvary. All that he knows of the Bible is from a lonely picture of the Holy Land. "All my life", he continues, I've compared myself to Christ". Here Estragon and Vladimir are on the same footing. They are equally ignorant and helpless, pitted against the inexorable and enigmatic Godot. It is here that Estragon and Godot represent the hopeless and helpless suffering humanity.

The two tramps have lost all sense of time. Waiting is what concerns them. They don't know if Godot will come today or tomorrow. So they have to kill time. Pozzo philosophies that man has an inevitable passage from the womb to the tomb : "One day we were born, one day we shall die." Vladimir does not philosophize. He chooses to live in the world of spirit, and asks: "Was I sleeping while others suffered ?"

Knowing full well that "Habit is a great deadner". Vladimir wants to meet the challenge of time by having recourse to idle talks and harangues playfully abusing each other doing the tree, antics and exercises, playing at Pozzo and Lucky-all traditional pastimes. One activity is followed by another. Then the same activity is repeated. That also becomes dull and monotonous. They, then, stop talking and resort to thinking. They start talking again.

Vladimir suffers unbearable agony arising out of spiritual questionings. His ability to think is also a source of suffering. Hugh Walpole observes : “The world is a comedy to those who think, the world is a tragedy to those who feel." But Vladimir gives the lie to this statement, and suffers intensely in spite of thinking. He has to suffer for being an intellectual.

Estragon, on the other hand, has a mind that is a clean slate. He does not tax his mind with the memory of the past, of time and date. He does not care to remember of even what happened yesterday: "I'm not a historian”.

Vladimir and Estragon had their past, not an ignoble one. They were then respectable beings, not to be jettisoned from the fashionable society. But cruel life has taken its heavy toll. Both of them are vagrants. This is a bleak picture of regression. Their personalities have suffered disintegration. Himself a miserable man, Estragon has warm praise for Pozzo, the tyrant.

Vladimir, on the other hand, has warm sympathy for Lucky, who is treated like a dog. But both Estragon and Vladimir are inextricably tied to the place, Waiting for Godot. They have no choice, no freedom. It is here they become identified. "Yes, let's go", they say at the end of Act 1, and yet they donot move. At the end of Act II, they say, "yes, let's go", and yet they donot move. Godot will never come. They are in the twilight of their life with nothing to illuminate their souls.

In spite of their brief separation, Estragon and Vladimir meet again, Vladimir approaches Estragon : "Come here till I embrace you". Estragon in a fit of tantrum replies: "Don't touch me ! Don't question me! Don't speak to me! Stay with me!"

Occasionally there might have been a brief moment of love-hate relationship between the two, but it is love that triumphs. Desolation, doubt, fear and helplessness will persist till the end of their days. But the lamp of love between the two friends may dim, but not die.

Also Read:

• Waiting for Godot as an Absurd Drama or the Appropriateness of the Title
• Who is Godot in Beckett's Waiting for Godot?

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Who is Godot in Beckett's Waiting for Godot?

What is the identity of Godot?

The meaning of Waiting for Godot has defied analysis. Critics have spilled ink and failed to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion. “Even those who agreed that Godot had a 'meaning’," says Alec Reid, "were deeply divided among themselves as to what that meaning was”.  Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, are waiting to meet a men or a divine being known as Godot, who eventually does not turn up. The identity of Godot has posed a question, yet to be answered. According to Ruby Cohn, Godot has been variously identified as God, a diminutive God, Love, Death, Silence, Hope, DeGaulle, a Balzac character, a bicycle racer, and a Paris Street for call girls.

To Alan Schneider, who anxiously asked him about the identity of Godot, Beckett replied: "If I know, I would have said so in the play." He also remarked, and it is difficult to ascertain if he was serious or flippant, that the spectacular success of Waiting for Godor was due to the misunderstanding. The critics and public alike were seeking to impose an allegorical or symbolic explanation of Godot.

And yet Godot remains an enigma. Others abide our question, and Godot, like Mathew Arnold’s Shakespeare, smiles and smiles, and out tops our knowledge. Had Godot appeared on the stage even for a moment, we could have sized him up. But he does not come. We learn from a messenger boy that he will come on the following day. But he fails to fulfil his appointment.

Furthermore the name ‘Godot’ will entail many possible meanings if it is observed within the context of French. According to Graver, there are some common French words and phrases which begin with ‘god’. Godillot in French for ‘old shapeless boot’; Godasses are ‘military boots’, Godailler is ‘to go pub‐crawling’. Goder means ‘to pucker’. In addition, ‘Godo’ is spoken Irish for God. Thus, as a ‘signifier’, ‘Godot’ potentially will result in many debatable and fractured interpretations.

Is Godot God?

Right upto the end of the play Godot remains a mysterious figure. If we regard Waiting for Godot as Christian play or a Morality play, Godot may stand for God. Martin Esslin lends unqualifying support to this view. He says that the play is concerned with the ultimate realities of the human condition, for an Absurd Drama is concerned with the fundamental problems of life and death. When man fails to answer the questions relating to ultimate reality, he has to think of God and religion.

If so, Godot is as much the God of the Old Testament as of the New. Jehovah and Godot may look alike, particularly for his white beard. The similarity may also be noticed when we consider that Godot does not love everybody. He has handsome rewards for the boy who tends the goats, while he metes out punishment to the shepherd the award appears arbitrary. That reminds us of Jehovah, who preferred Abel to Cain. The reference to the goats and sheeps is to be found in the Gospel according to St. Matthew : "And he [Christ] shall seat the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left."

Godot may refer suffering also. “The casual relationship between divine cruelty and human suffering is perhaps most effectively dramatised in Beckett's portrayal of many of his characters as emblematic Biblical sufferers". Suffering is divine punishment. Christ himself is the worst sufferer in his mundane existence His death on the Cross, says Hersh Zeifman, is the paradigm of divine rejection. It is for this reason that Estragon says: "All my life I've compared myself to Christ."

With absolutely no ambiguity Beckett refers to salvation and damnation in his play. Vladimir mentions two thieves crucified on either side of Christ, one of whom was saved and the other damped. The two tramps are also thinking in terms of salvation or damnation according to the sweet will of Godot. Much depends on their repentance, which is the way to divine grace. On an inquiry from Vladimir if he has ever read the Bible, Estragon replies: "I remember the maps of the Holy Land, Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That's where we'll go, I used to say, that's where we'll go for our honeymoon."

If we accept this view, Godot may mean God. But Becket has no anthropomorphic conception of God. The very fact that God does not come means that he is disembodied. But just because he does not come, it does not mean that he is non-existent As far as Vladimir is concerned, he very much exists. The idea of salvation is all the while haunting his mind.

When asked by Pozzo to think', Lucky gives a harangue on Godot. When the gaudy and inane phraseology is left out, he says: "Given the existence of a personal God with a white beard outside time who from the heights of divine apathia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell."

Godot may be termed as “waiting” what really matters. Waiting is charged with expectancy. Everybody waiting for something expects that something better will turn up.

Eric Bentley does not set store by the religious interpretation of Waiting for Godot. He maintains that the name Godot is taken from a play entitled Mercader. Mercadet is a stock Exchange speculator who all the while complains that his financial trouble are largely due to Godeau, who defalcated the money and away.

But the religious interpretation has a greater appeal himself quoted from St. Augustine: “Don’t despair ! One of the thieves was saved. Donot presume. One of the thieves was damned.” It is this conviction that makes Godot a loving figure and not a bugbear.

 Also Read:

• Waiting for Godot as an Absurd Drama

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Samuel Becket's "Waiting for Godot" as an Absurd Drama or Justify the Significance of the title "Waiting for Godot"

“In a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusion and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile…. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and the setting, truly constitutes the feeling of absurdity.”

-         Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.

What Ionesco insists upon in the nothingness and absurdity of life, so does Samuel Becket: “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.” Absurd drama is a complete denial of age old values. It has no plot, no characterization, no logical sequence, no culmination. It questions the very meaning of existence, which is full of sound fury but signifies nothing. The term “absurd” was first used by Albert Camus in his famous work, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). It is very clear from the very word “Absurd” that it means nonsensical, opposed to reason, something silly, foolish, senseless, ridiculous and topsy-turvy. So, a drama having a cock and bull story would be called an absurd play.

The theatre of the absurd is a phenomenon of the fifties. Becket’s Waiting for Godot reflects the absurdist position of the Post World War II human who is lost in the labyrinth of disillusionment. The glorification of life has been slept into history; humanity lost its way.

‘Nothingness’ (ex nihilo nihilfit) constitutes the major concern for Samuel Becket. According to Martin Esslin, “Nothingness is related to an empty space - no spur to look forward.” The play Waiting for Godot is only active in gestural energy: “Lets go”. Martin Esslin in his book The Theatre of the Absurd (1961) claims that, Waiting for Godot does not tell a story. It explores a static situation: “Everything is dead but the tree.” The play is based on the theme “nothing to be done”. The gestural energy of the tramps waiting for the sake of waiting ends in “They do not move.”

En-attendant-godot, the original French play and its subsequent translation in English impresses us in the manner of James Joyce’s Ulysses where the readers experience the same feeling of waiting for something to happen. In the play Estragon and Vladimir wait for Godot who can be interpreted variously as diminutive of God, Love, Hope, Death, Silence and Waiting. The different nationalities e.g. Estragon from France; Vladimir Russian; Pozzo Italian; Lucky English constitute a parameter of absurdity in the general progression of the drama. The play projects a basic nullity of human life.  

The innovative formal design in Waiting for Godot contributes to the main theme of absurdity to a great extant. By all established canons of drama, a good play must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The entire play in the two acts is woven with repetition; Act II is the repetition of the Act I. In each act we were offered basically the same sequence: the tramps reunite, contrive, pass time, encounter Pozzo and Lucky, receive Godot’s disappointing message, gesturally decide to leave but physically do not move: “Nothing to be done”

Waiting for Godot depicts time as a circular reality. Time is related to the tramps’ hope and despair. We have the impression that the tramps are nothing but the instruments of killing time. Time is a “Double-headed monster of damnation and salvation.” Everything in normal human experience is subjected to tampus fugit (time flies). But time as recorded in this drama is perpetually present; no past and future: “They all change, only we can’t.”

The lack of characterization is the hallmark of any absurd drama. In Waiting for Godot, Estragon, Vladimir, Lucky, Pozzo and the non-existence Godot, do not Grow during the course of the play. They cannot be treated as proper character. Their cross-talks reflect the very idea of nothingness as they have nothing to communicate - just to be in a static position perpetually. “Here form is content and content is form.” At the end of the play we are at the same position as we were at the beginning. The trajectory of nothingness develops in between.

In an absurd drama, speech is reduced to a minimum, In the theatre of the absurd, rules are broken, conventions are flouted.  As Esslin states, “If a good play relies on witty repartee and pointed dialogue, these often consist of incoherent babblings”. Here the language is used just as mere game to pass time - as they have nothing to do. Most of the time, the appropriate discourse is being broken. The logicism of conversation is not been maintained.

Estragon: Well, shall we go?

Vladimir: Yes, let’s go.

(The do not move)

We may conclude in the voice of Esslin, “It is the peculiar richness of a play like Waiting for Godot that it opens vistas on so many different perspectives. It is open to philosophical, religious and psychological interpretations, yet above all it is a poem on time, evanescence, the paradox of change and stability, necessity and absurdity”.

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