Beckett Would Understand

I love Waiting For Godot. It’s one of my favorite pieces of literature. Many people familiar with Samuel Beckett’s play think it’s pretentious garbage. I couldn’t disagree more strongly.

Waiting For Godot may be strange and unsatisfying, but that’s actually the point. Life, Beckett tells us through his narrative, can be a strange and unsatisfying thing.

To those unfamiliar with the play, Waiting For Godot is about two tramps waiting by the side of the road for a man named Godot. There’s a tree nearby. Oh, and a boy (or is it two boys?) who periodically shows up to say Godot will arrive in due time. By play’s end, the tramps are still waiting.

Sound familiar?

It’s now Saturday. My wife and I have been without power a full week. As I glance out my window I realize the promised repair crews remain nowhere in sight. Still, we’re told periodically to be patient, that Godot, I mean CL@P, will be here. Small comfort. At least the tree in Beckett’s play was standing up. There’s a large one here resting atop a neighbor’s roof.

I, like Beckett’s characters and untold others, have been rightfully griping all week. Having said that, I should make it clear my point here isn’t to whine (those CL@P people are working themselves to the bone, after all), but to illustrate a larger point: that literature, which we’re told is being pushed to society’s margins, will always have something to say, sometimes absurdly, about the absurd world in which we live.

Is that a truck I hear coming up our road?