Comment on the title Waiting for Godot. (within 500 words)

There are two operative expressions in Beckett's title

1. Waiting--the play is about an act of waiting. Didi and Gogo wait for their unknown salvation-damnation-man in the name of Mr. Godot. This waiting is an act of prayer, a dynamics of desire, where the object of desire as it is supposed to be, is obscure and absent. This act of waiting is also waiting for the encounter with an other that will found the subjectivity of the two tramps. The waiting in Beckett is a matter of stoic compulsion. It is a pure act, which has to be done for its own sake. Even though the two tramps know that Godot will never come, they have to wait. This waiting signifies life in all its meaning-making terms.

2. Godot--Godot is conventionally seen as a differential word-play on God with a certain kind of Frenchified spelling. But it is important to note that Beckett does not use the French synonym of God, which is 'Dieu' but rather plays on its English counterpart. Whether a symbol of divinity or not, Godot is a signifier nevertheless--a proper name, even a signature. There is no signified for it. Instead of trying to read Godot symbolically and trying to find out if it represents God or the meaning of life or a political master, or a patronymic, going by Beckett's own notion of the symbol which always emphasizes on the objectness of the object than on its symbolic import, what director Peter Brook calls a "pure symbol", I think we should see Godot as a seductive but hollow symbol which, once investigated, returns to its self-reflexivity. Thus, Godot symbolizes Godot only and nothing more, nothing less.