Things They Carried By Samuel Beckett: Character Analysis

The symmetry continues through Beckett’s pairing of characters. Just as he uses the division of the setting as an allegorical symbol for eternity, Beckett divides the human race into two parts, first symbolized by Vladimir and Estragon, the former representing the intellectual and the latter the simpleton. In one example of his intelligence, Vladimir questions assumptions that many take as truth when pondering the story about the thieves. He states, “[H]ow is it that of the four Evangelists only one speaks of a thief being saved. The four of them were there . . . and only one speaks of a thief being saved . . . Why believe him rather than the others?” (Beckett 9,). Estragon follows Vladimir’s questioning with difficulty, remarking with “exaggerated

It's safer” proving that he is unable to think of a way out of their misery (12). With the entrance of Pozzo and Lucky, the symmetrical division further cleaves into four, with Estragon-Vladimir representing the inherent need for companionship and Pozzo and Lucky the symbolic need to dominate others. Vladimir and Estragon’s friendship is vital to their situation, whereas Pozzo and Lucky’s relationship functions on a bizarre dominate-submissive plain. In several instances, Vladimir helps Estragon with is boots, feeds him carrots, and alludes to the fact that he would not allow ruffians to beat his friend if he were present. In contrast, Pozzo treats Lucky with disdain, forcing him to carry his luggage while tethered to him by a rope. Lucky, treated as an animal and forced to “dance” and “think” only for entertainment, is the submissive. With the boy messenger’s arrival, each time the tetrad meld into the original duo again, suggesting the cyclical nature of life’s moments. The choice to limit the play to two symmetrical acts of identical repetition forces the audience to question not only the characters’ existence and their relationship to each other, but also to examine their own “human reaction to a common experience,” a frequent subject of Absurd plays (Banerjee

Little is known about Vladimir or Estragon except that they wait for Godot, a faceless person who never appears in the play. They have no past to speak of except the rehash of events that occurred the day before in a seemingly repetitive cycle. They appear, greet each other, and wait. Cuddy challenges the assertion that no exposition exists, suggesting that “[o]ne could claim that Beckett has provided the exposition of his play in general and of Godot in particular, but this exposition does not lead the audience anywhere in the sense that is expected in an Aristotelian spectacle” (322). In other words, instead of expressly stating expository information through words or actions, the absence of the backstory and the nature of the conflict provides the exposition in this “philosophical art [form] that is simultaneously a representation and a meta-representation,” and as a result, “the issues of content and form are not very clear-cut and may in fact overlap” (320). This strategy leads to many interpretations of who Godot is and how he is related to Vladimir and Estragon. Some critics have hypothesized that Godot, an absent but ever-present figure, represents God, so when contemplating suicide to