You may have read that there was great resistance to Darwinism in the late 19th century in Europe and America. The post World War II period was also the time when Darwinian evolution was triumphant as the philosophical backdrop of western culture.

Such arrogance came crashing down in the aftermath of bloody conflicts in Europe.

It was thought that education of the Asian and African peoples would bring them into enlightened European values and would civilize the world. This pessimism was a sharp departure from the earlier Victorian period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when Europe was astride the world and the British empire and other European empires had colonies on every continent. It was Sartre who famously wrote: “Man is a useless passion.” This time of pessimism was also the heyday of two radical atheist existentialist philosophers, Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. This was a post World War II cultural phenomenon that reflected a philosophy of extreme pessimism. Beckett’s generation had lived through the horrors of two world wars and the mass murder of millions in the holocaust. (Wikipedia)īeckett was a key figure in the movement called The Theater of the Absurd.

Beckett himself was often asked its meaning and like most artists, he usually preferred to keep his audience guessing. Godot, the one they were waiting for, never shows up. It’s dense, opaque, inscrutable and open to an endless variety of interpretations. Later on, three additional characters enter the scene to engage in circumlocutory chatter and conflict. Vladimir often leaves the stage to urinate and Estragon at one point suggests they hang themselves. It centers around two characters, the philosophical Vladimir, and the tired cynic, Estragon. It’s been performed countless times all over the world in many languages. It’s a two act absurdist play with meandering, metaphorical, and at times, off color dialogue. It was almost banned in London where Beckett’s English translation was performed a couple of years later. Waiting for Godot was controversial from the time of its premiere in Paris in 1953. Its author, Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) received the 1969 Nobel Prize in literature for this play and his many other writings. The play, Waiting for Godot was voted the most significant English language play of the 20th century in a 1999 British poll of 800 playwrights, actors, directors and journalists.

Beckett samuel waiting for godot