Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 An endgame of aesthetics
- 2 Beckett's English fiction
- 3 Three novels and four nouvelles
- 4 Waiting for Godot and Endgame
- 5 Stages of identity
- 6 Beginning again
- 7 The mediated Quixote
- 8 Dead heads
- 9 Disabled figures
- 10 Beckett's poems and verse translations or
- 11 Beckett as director
- 12 Beckett's bilingualism
- 13 Beckett and the philosophers
- Further reading
- Index
4 - Waiting for Godot and Endgame
theatre as text
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- 1 An endgame of aesthetics
- 2 Beckett's English fiction
- 3 Three novels and four nouvelles
- 4 Waiting for Godot and Endgame
- 5 Stages of identity
- 6 Beginning again
- 7 The mediated Quixote
- 8 Dead heads
- 9 Disabled figures
- 10 Beckett's poems and verse translations or
- 11 Beckett as director
- 12 Beckett's bilingualism
- 13 Beckett and the philosophers
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
Beckett once asserted: 'I produce an object. What people make of it is not my concern [...] I'd be quite incapable of writing a critical introduction to my own works.' Furthermore, whenever directors and critics asked for explanations of Godot, he both side-stepped their questions and revealed his distrust of any kind of exegesis. Two examples will suffice here. To Alan Schneider's question 'Who or what does Godot mean?', he replied, 'If I knew, I would have said so in the play'; when Colin Duckworth suggested that the characters existed in a modern version of Dante's Purgatory, he responded to the 'proofs' offered to him with a dismissive, if generous 'Quite alien to me, but you're welcome.' As is now clearly established, allusions to Dante are present throughout his novels and plays, but Beckett's position remained resolute; he wanted no part in the process of decoding that haunts critical work, preferring to cling to his belief that: 'The key word in my plays is “perhaps”.'
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Beckett , pp. 67 - 87Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994
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