Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett

"Life is a chaos between two silences", said Samuel Beckett. The Irish playwright was only sure of two things: he had been born and he had to die. He left Dublin and travelled to Paris with the obsession of meeting James Joyce. He joined the novelist´s literary circle there and became his assistant. But Lucia, Joyce´s schizophrenic daughter, fell in love with him and his refusal of her caused Ulysses´s author to ban him from his home.

Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, Beckett is one of the great names of the Theatre of the Absurd. First written in French, Waiting for Godot is a metaphor of the absurdity of human existence, of man´s loneliness and boredom and of the deseperate search for meaning in life. Throughout the play, and while they are waiting for Godot, the main characters, two tramps, try to fill in the empty time on an eternal Saturday which follows Good Friday but which never becomes Easter Sunday. Very little 

happens, life is meaningless. Like them, we also spend much of our time waiting constantly for something new to happen so that our life has sense. Their incoherent dialogue dramatically shows our failure to communicate. Literary critics have wondered who this Godot is, someone who seems to be on the point of arriving but who never does so. Beckett used to say that if he had had the answer, he would have written it.

One day, Beckett was flying to Paris when the chief flight attendant said: "I´m speaking in Captain Godot´s name..." Immediately, he wanted to jump out of the plane up in the air.