Many a time, some of us would have mused over the purpose of our birth and life. We study, work, marry, have children and family, earn name and fame if possible, accrue wealth by luck and ability and then become aged and start waiting.
I don’t prescribe this analysis to everyone, but to those who think and recall life events and feel happy or sad or proud and then finally relax. They have nothing much to do but to think of the past.
But, like a play or cinema with all action-packed instances, happy moments and dramatic turns, heart wrenching miseries also come to an end or closure in some form. There can be something like “they lived happily there after” or “the protagonist is dead” or “it just continues”. Though everyone’s life ends with death, till then there are events which keep happening for good and bad.
Do they carry any values, meaning, sense and lessons? All sometimes; some at times and none most of the times.
Shakespeare said our lives are just like plays which come to an end when the curtains are down. The most famous speech in As You Like It is the Seven Ages of Man, which says All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot tries to tell the absurdity or purposelessness of life. It was voted the most significant English language play of the 20th century by the British Royal National Theatre.
Of the two, the former is more acceptable to most of us because everyone’s life is an interesting tale in some way or other while many start feeling the purposelessness of their lives only after a stage. Both convey something; some persons are born in this world with a purpose; for others it is just existence with absurdity. Sounds unfair and cruel? Yes. It is.
Beckett juxtaposes the modern human psyche with hope or pursuit of happiness in one way and in other ways, he shows the absurdity of human life. Beckett presents two major characters, Vladimir and Estragon, who go on waiting for Godot. They represent today’s human psyche. Surprisingly, Beckett was not open to most interpretative approaches to his work.
Right or wrong? Well, the decision is ours.
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