Beckett: Critical quotes

Question 1

Saussure: the emptiness of language

Answer 1

Saussure: “words contain signifiers (the sign) and signified (the meaning) which make up communication”.

Signs in Beckett’s plays are arbitrary. Conversation is like a game of tennis and when the signs don’t match up miscommunication occurs (coite vs coïte)

Question 2

Meta-theatre

Answer 2

Renee Rièse Hubert: “Mastership…appears no more than a hollow pretence or a theatrical trick whereby Beckett makes us aware that we are all slaves”

Reflects the audience to the characters (we are all in the master/slave dynamic like them), but in our case it may be to other things in life, not others.

Question 3

The decay of language

Answer 3

Alan Astro: “The rapid shift between opposites…is another example of the terrible disintegration of existence and language”

Question 4

Ambiguity of time, and concept of time

Answer 4

Alan Astro:
“Even if we can imagine Godot coming, Didi and Gogo will always be waiting for him; Hamm and Clov will always be ‘nearly finished’”
“Thus, when the play ‘ends’, it actually returns to its beginning”

Question 5

Language to fill the time (meaningless):

Answer 5

Alan Astro: “We share the character’s pain as spectators of the terribly laborious dialogue and action”

Question 6

Meta-theatre (the characters reflect us)

Answer 6

Martin Esslin: “The spectators of the Theatre of the Absurd are thus confronted with a grotesquely heightened picture of their own world.”