Waiting For Godot

Samuel Beckett

Pozzo: (Suddenly Furious.) Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (Calmer.) They give birth astride a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. (He jerks the rope.) On!

It is safe to say I did not understand this play, but I also got the feeling from that understanding wasn't the issue. I haven't yet read any commentary on it beyond the dust-jacket, but judging from the ambiguity of the play, I bet there is plenty of commentary to be had. What really made me happy, in some confusing way, was how the play resembles a circle. Composed of two acts, the first could just as easily be the second and the second the first. There are certain moments in the first act which seem very confusing at the time, but once you get to the second act, you begin to understand. It works out as a beautiful circle. Each act, which is an evening, melting into the next and melting back into itself. Whether you want to read this as some sort of meaningless of time or perhaps the aimlessness of life, I'm not going to hazard a guess. Look for clues to this neat little trick of Beckett's when you read Waiting for Godot.
Another very interesting aspect of the play is everyone's incredible ignorance or stupidity. Memory is incredibly faulty, to the point that the characters seem feeble at the best and infantile at worst. Beckett is working at some point with this, although I am not sure what. I couldn't help but imagine that when you take a step back, we must seem the same way to the impartial observer. Really, we cannot remember things which happen mere minutes ago, much less the day before.
And of course there is the confusion around waiting. I did not find difficulty imagining that this whole ponderous, expansive, and as yet unfulfilled waiting which is the whole play was really a thinly guised metaphor for the second coming of Christ which so much of the Christian world is "in waiting" for. The language characters use to talk about Godot is anything if not suggestive.
I also was enthralled with Beckett's thin usage of characters and props. Five characters, one of which is a very small part, is the total cast. I have heard that Beckett is known for his minimalist sort of productions, and once I read Krapp's Last Tape which might have been the culmination of this. While I doubt that just any person can carry off this sort of sparse play, Beckett does. As well as the minimalism, I thought the dialog flowed faster and more smoothly than most. This might have been because I was reading and not watching, but this isn't a theater blog, so I expect this will inspire only to read Godot, if anything.
But the most puzzling aspect of the whole play, the thing which I am almost wholly uncertain on is Pozzo and Lucky. These two characters make their way back and forth across the stage, one of them has the longest speech in the play, the other the most despicable character, and I have no clue why they are in the play at all. I wouldn't say that they are any Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but only that I am lost when it comes to them. 7/10