“ESTRAGON: [bending over Lucky] He’s breathing.
VLADIMIR: Then let him have it.”

Having read the marvelous Malone Dies a few months ago, I decided to complete the triology with its final entry, The Unnamable, but decided to have a go at this work before proceeding to that one.

I had seen a film version of Godot on Youtube long before this reading, and I enjoyed returning to it in book form to get a closer look at its mechanics. Like all works by Beckett that I have read, Godot is unique, striking, and at home in its paradoxes. Beckett succeeds in his seemingly impossible task, with great sharpness and acuity, striking a balance of comedy and bleakness, nonsense and profundity, familiarity and alienness, which play off of each other to make Godot entertaining and moving. Here is a writer who has trimmed his concepts to the bone, whose work speaks with bladelike precision, who has made a bed of the mind’s bedrock. See I tickets to Godot, I will lunge for them.

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“Samuel Beckett Bridge” by Daniel Dudek is licensed under CC BY 2.0. View a copy of this license here.