Identity

Weblog, I have neglected thee...

The most intriguing aspect of Waiting for Godot is the same thing I've found interesting about most of Beckett's works: the malleable nature of identity. What sets Godot's crises of identity apart from those of, say, the head in The Unnameable, is that in this play, it's mostly comic, while in the final novel of the trilogy (as with the other two novels, of course), the lack of a concrete identity is tragic, terrifying, and very confusing.

In many works, Beckett relates memory with a clear sense of identity. I wrote about this connection in a previous blog post, and I think this comparison holds true in Godot as well, specifically in the case of Estragon. His memory continuously fails him, leaving him with a constant need not only to be reminded of what has transpired, but a need to rebuild his knowledge base. Vladimir must remind him why they wait for Godot, who their miscellaneous companions are, and what names are. By constantly forgetting everything important about his surroundings, Estragon constantly forgets who he is, and thus never forms any kind of concrete identity. (It must be really, really hard to play that part on stage.)

Therefore, because the play involves a constant manipulation of what it is to be, the play becomes an existential crisis much like that of The Unnameable. The characters in Godot seem to be moving towards some kind of a conclusion, but they do not know why, how, or when such a conclusion will be reached. Similarly, in The Unnameable, the head in the jar muses about the very strangeness of being, never truly reaching any conclusion except to "go on," to keep moving.