Relevance of Act 2 in Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play written by Samuel Beckett. The play seems to refuse any attempt to impose meaning systematically. The author would have us believe that time is meaningless, that repetition rules all, that inertia is manifest and human life is pointless. This idea that human life lacks meaning and purpose and that humans live in an indifferent universe is often associated with Existentialist writers like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre who, unlike Beckett, brought to life their dark ideas in traditional linear novels and plays with round rather than flat characters. Critics argue that Beckett’s non-traditional play, a classic example of what has come to be known as the Theatre of the Absurd, more fully clarifies the era’s bleak existentialist vision. It is a vision of irrationality- sheer waiting without end or outcome; yet these experiences of shapelessness and purposelessness are given powerful and distinctive shape by distinctive dramatic structure and elaborate repetitions.
Swati Pal in her essay, Repetition and Recollection In Waiting For Godot says, “Act 2 is only a variation of Act 1, almost a near repetition of it”. Act I and Act II are threads in a repetitive pattern. Everything has happened over and over before and chances are that the pattern will continue to repeat itself over and over again. Both have essentially the same beginning, occur at the same time of day in the same setting, contain the