Purpose of Life, Modern Changes, and Human Isolation Essay

An especially confusing irony arising from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is that one of history’s more well-received and lauded plays is at the same time accorded so many diverse interpretations that understanding frequently seems elusive. The academic and critical literature clearly illustrates how the play has been debated. Exact thematic elements and even the playwright’s precise motivations have proven difficult to derive from the narrative’s textual structure. These interpretive nuances and proffered variations have been rendered even more suspect because Samuel Beckett offered evasive replies whenever he was queried about the intended function of certain characters or his personal intentions regarding any particular passage. These realities are not offered to argue that particular thematic features are incapable of determination, as familiar types of themes and thematic elements can be fairly well-established to a certain extant, but simply to point out and to acknowledge as a theoretical point of departure that Waiting for Godot is a broadly conceived type of narrative that touches upon many themes rather than being narrowly constrained to a particular theme. An examination of certain secondary scholarly analyses unequivocally illustrates the breadth of academic interpretations arguing that Beckett’s play addresses themes such as the meaning of God, the quest for individual salvation, the resistance of the French people against Germany’s occupation during World War Two, how human beings ought to live their lives in changing times, the fleeting nature of time, and the new circumstances that human beings had to adapt to in a post-World War Two era emerging from the Industrial Revolution. To be sure, with so many different interpretations supported by references to certain passages of the play’s text and relevant historical factors, it might seem highly unlikely to persuasively support a dominant or fundamental theme. A critical and comprehensive review of the textual evidence, on the other hand, does eventually suggest that there does exist a primary theme. This dominant theme in Waiting for Godot is that human beings can never truly understand the world in which they exist or how individuals are to be best integrated into a world with contradictory messages and imperfect information. Such a thesis can function to harmonize the different interpretations offered by secondary sources by showing how the main characters’ dialogue in different circumstances consistently illustrates and reinforces the human search for a definite purpose and a rational meaning in an external environment that persistently appears hopelessly incomprehensible. A Unifying Theme: Transcending Particular Interpretations To begin, addressing secondary theories before turning to the play’s actual text, it is necessary to demonstrate how academic and critical commentary has created more confusion than understanding by concentrating too narrowly from a thematic point of view. This type of analytical framework is necessary because virtually all of these at times conflicting and contradictory interpretations are capable of harmonization to a large extant if the play’s primary theme is posited as the individual human being’s desire to better understand and comprehend the function of the human animal in an incomprehensible external environment. It is superficially agreed, for example, that Beckett frequently utilizes universal themes in the narrative; in this respect, one secondary source argues that, â€Å"Waiting for Godot, in many ways, simply extends those uncertainties: Why are we here? Are we alone in an uncaring universe, or not? What are we to do while we are here? How can we know? And, ultimately, what does it matter? †(Hutchings x). This focus on universal concerns in the key to understanding the play and identifying the fundamental theme; indeed, these universal types of characterizations function in the larger picture to transcend more limited and narrow types of interpretations.