Beckett's view of the human condition in Waiting for Godot
Written in the mid-'50s, in other words shortly after the end of World War II, Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot offers a most perceptive, bitter and yet quite sympathetic vision of the human condition in the trying times Europe was then going through. Vladimir and Estragon, the two principal characters, spend their lives "waiting for Godot" in an almost desert scenery. The characters of the play are very few, five only, plus Godot, the invisible sixth, who is all the same omnipresent due to the continual reference to him by Estragon and Vladimir. In a dramatic environment where the animate element, as well as the non-animate, appear reduced to the absolutely functional, an entire existential reasoning is amply presented to the audience.
