On Waiting For Godot

Waiting For Godot (hereafter as WFG) is the first successful play of Samuel Beckett. WFG is a play of absurd with a philosophical basis on existentialism. The social background of the play is that in the 1950s after the two world wars, the loss of belief came along with the financial crisis in the western society. God is dead. People had to find a new meaning to justify their short-lived life. WFG is a play of two acts set in a bleak and empty stage where there is a lonely leafless tree besides a lonely road from nowhere and to nowhere. Two tramps Gogo and Didi are waiting for Godot under the tree. While waiting they play games to pass the time. The entrance of a master and slave couple, Pozzo and Lucky, temporally breaks their boredom of waiting. After their departure, a boy brings the message to the tramps that Godot won't come that day but surely next day. The first act ends. The second act is almost the repetition of the first only with little variations. This play is quite different from the traditional ones in form. It has no plot, no traditional cha racterization, no climax and no solution. WFG is the presentation of the absurdity and futility of the human existence, and the expression of the metaphisical pain of the people who are in search for a new meaning for their existence but whose efforts are in vain.This thesis is about the ways that Beckett employs in his play Waiting for Godot to reveal the theme: the absurdity and entropy of existence from four aspects?anti-traditional structure; minimized stage setting; contrasted characters; devalued language which leads to the creation of the theatrical form which admits the chaos and accommodates the mess, and the unity of form and content.