Trapped in Time: Immobility as Tragedy in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

The burden of Beckett's characters in Waiting for Godot lies in their inability to make progress and in the elevated state of despair that this engenders. They represent the fallen state of man and His struggle to uplift himself to a more respectable circumstance. This paper interrogates Beckett's concept of time and how this constitutes the major source of his characters' malaise and tragedy. The concept of time as linear progression is the lie in which Beckett's characters is trapped. Rather than act as a vehicle of mobility, Time is the penultimate source of immobility. It is the tragic reflection of the fallen state of man, exalted paradoxically by debasement and disenfranchisement. Beckett turns Time, which is a measurement of human evolution into a symbol of hopelessness. Vladimir and Estragon are representations of defiled hope, who incarnate a besieged humanity caught in the throes of finitude, where expectation is aborted by an uncanny abstraction couched as Godot. This, Beckett seems to say is the source of our modern or rather postmodern anguish and anxiety, whose only resolution lies in human ability to be resilient and to choose. It is only in making a choice, that Vladimir and Estragon can mitigate their anguish and avert the tragedy of infinite wait.