Psychological Analysis Of Waiting For Godot

Psychological criticism adopts the methods of "Reading" employed by Freud and later theorists to interpret texts. It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author, that a literary work is a manifestation of the author's own neuroses. Here, we are going to apply the same form of criticism on Samuel Beckett’s play, ‘Waiting for Godot.’

 Unanswered questions behind the characters behaviour are answered here. We would be looking further to the psychoanalytical approach, Sigmund Freud being the important proponent here. A major focus on the language and how dreams reflect our mental personality are given in his second essay, “Interpretation of Dreams.”

The plot clearly states that Estragon has nightmares and Vladimir never addresses them and remains unhelpful towards it, being the one who is aware about their sufferings. The nightmares contain flashbacks and images of a gruesome and horrific event that has happened in both Vladimir and Estragon’s lives. It is Second World War and the nightmares reflect the post traumatic stress disorder that Estragon suffers in the play. Waiting for Godot, being a modernist play focuses on the psyche of the characters of the post World War II era. The essay by Freud talks about jagged thoughts, breaks and pauses, likewise Vladimir is lost in his thoughts in the play. He is the one who takes long pauses and cannot complete his sentences. This shows a clear indication that his mental personality is brutally affected due to the World War II. Vladimir represents a mental decay in the hat. The constant knocking of his hat is a symbolism of thinking and trying to remember all that happened, symbolism related to mental personality is mentioned in the essay. Dreams act as defence mechanisms, so one of the important defence mechanisms would be escapism, which means running away from reality and not facing it and ending up dreaming about it, literally. In the play, the nightmares by Estragon show the pain and torture they have gone through and the effects of it, so when Vladimir does not acknowledge Estragon’s nightmares, it is his escapism. He clearly mentions that he cannot bear listening to those nightmares. Displacement is another defence mechanism; it is a negative way of transferring your aggression, like a destructive desire. We can see displacement in Estragon when Vladimir ignores listening to him, and when he starts throwing tantrums. He is angry and sulks, behaves in a childish manner whenever his wishes are discontented.

Freud’s essay ‘Anatomy of Mental Personality’ gives a tri-pronged structure of human personality – the Id, the Ego and the Superego.  The Id consists of our desires and needs. The Ego governs the Id according to the reality principle and controls the irrational impulses.  The Superego strikes a balance between the two, and works as a moral police. Based on this essay, came about the Psychoanalytical approach to critiquing literature. This approach is divided into Id criticism, Ego criticism and the Lacanian or Semiotic criticism.

In his essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, Freud defines the pleasure principle as

a natural tendency to seek the fulfilment of our instincts and avoid pain. From the point of view of our self-preservation, it is “inefficient and highly dangerous”. The ego’s instinct of self-preservation leads to its being replaced by the reality principle, which is “the postponement of satisfaction and temporary toleration of the opposite of pleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure. The Id, the Ego and the Superego are the three parts of the psychic apparatus as defined by Sigmund Freud in his structural model of the psyche. The Id is “the dark, inaccessible part of our personality”, which acts according to the pleasure principle. Freud describes it as a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations filled with energy reaching it from the instincts”. It has no organization, no notion of time, and it contains all our basic instincts. The ego is that part of the Id modified by the direct influence of the external world. It acts according to the reality principle, and is described by Freud as a sort of reason and common sense” faculty. It is in a constant struggle to satisfy both the Id and the Superego, which results in anxiety and guilt.

Lacan talks about how a reader-book relationship differs from the relationship that the book and the author have. For the author, the book will always be a field of symbols. For the reader, however, the book will be how the reader thinks about literature in general. According to Lacan, there are three kinds of readers that read books. The first ones are the realist. The second are the symbolists and the third are the ostriches.

The realists are pragmatic thinkers. They will notice a pattern in the writing or nuances, but other than that, they cannot pick out much since they only see the real value. The symbolist see the real symbolism behind what the author has written, they are the greater type of critic since they understand the book better than anyone else does. Ostriches are those who read the book at face value and have an inherent blind spot. They cannot see the symbolism or the pattern hidden in the writing and hence, they overlook the importance and what the book is trying to say.

In Waiting for Godot, the ostriches will take it at face value as a story of two people who are waiting for someone named Godot but he isn’t coming, instead, they keep meeting people who are irrelevant to the whole thing, like Pozzo and Lucky. The realist will see the pattern, that there is something wrong with the two characters on a deeper level and them waiting for someone who isn’t coming is a sign of something deeper and much more traumatizing. Yet, they will not delve into why the play is structured the way it is.

Symbolist, however, will see the symbols that are present in the dialogues said by the characters. In the eyes of the symbolists, the characters are two people who have lost all hope in life, who do not understand that maybe Godot will not come. For Vladimir and Estragon, rather than waiting for Godot, they would consider suicide in a heartbeat. But the fact that Godot can come the next day or the day after, keeps them going. They will wait in that desolated area just because they don’t want to miss Godot if he comes. Or maybe, they don’t know home or they don’t have one to go back to. For Vladimir and Estragon, nothing is more important than each other and Godot. At a point of time, Estragon finds Vladimir stressful, childishly ignores Vladimir as if he wants to and at the same time, will turn to him when he can’t understand something. Vladimir symbolises sanity or some form of sanity in the play. He is the much more on the stable side of the play, to balance out Estragon’s moodiness and childishness. Vladimir understands the situation much better than Estragon and tries to keep Estragon on track as well.

Pozzo and Lucky, the two other characters of the play, are Yin and Yang. Where Pozzo can symbolise the hard and ruthless aristocracy that ruled over the helpless, Lucky is the helpless worker who was crushed by the aristocracy. When Lucky breaks out and gives his long speech in Act I, it is then that his feelings topple out, missing into one another and coming out as a jumble of words that make no sense in one go, but make sense when taken and picked apart.

Vladimir and Estragon also symbolise the common public after the World War II, where the general populace was left disillusioned by the government and the promises of the politicians. Estragon shows the denial, childlike and moody phase, that most people have. Vladimir is the depressed part of the populace who’s aware of what’s wrong and accepts it with open eyes, yet holds some hope to see better days. The hope of getting better is seen in the dream that may get to see Godot if they wait long enough. However, somewhere deep down, Vladimir knows – even if Estragon doesn’t – that Godot isn’t going to come, just how he symbolises the government and it’s useless promises.

The Id criticism psychoanalyses Samuel Beckett’s works and characters within the works. For him, ‘Waiting for Godot’ was being complicated by people unnecessarily.  He didn’t understand the need for people to do so.  However, Beckett being a part of numerous schools of thought it was impossible to pin the absurdist play down to one foundation. Throughout the play there are endless religious, political, philosophical and biographical references. It’s hard to separate the art from the artist. To Beckett the play was “all symbiosis”. The psychoanalytic reading of the text states that the main characters stand for the three prongs of mental personality, the more rational Go-go is the incomplete Ego [(e)go- (e)go]. Didi is seen as the more irrational, impulsive aspect (id-id) and thus stands for the Id. Godot is seen as a representation of the Superego.

Speaking of Samuel Beckett, he was an active member of the French resistance in WWII.  After their group was infiltrated Beckett and his companion Suzanne realised their cover was blown and fled to a remote mountain village in Southeast France, walking by night and sleeping by day. There they waited out the rest of the war. This experience is said to have influenced his work ‘Waiting for Godot’ with the protagonists wandering around, foot weary and hopeless but expectant. Waiting for Godot has been described as a "metaphor for the long walk into Roussillon, when Beckett and Suzanne slept in haystacks during the day and walked by night”. Here comes in the autobiographical element. He said he wrote Godot as "a relaxation, to get away from the awful prose I was writing at the time”. When the play finally got to rehearsal, the first three sets of actors quit in confusion and despair. They would keep asking Beckett who the characters were and what they mean, Beckett would keep shrugging his shoulders.

The Id criticism also looks into the symbols that represent sexuality in a work. There are some obvious phallic symbols like the carrots and radishes that are discussed repeatedly in the play.  The vegetation (or the lack of it) represents fertility/ sexuality. Overall, the interactions between the characters of Estragon and Vladimir can be seen as a relationship between a married couple (the bickering, the comforting, not being able to part ways).  "They bicker, they embrace each other, they depend upon each other. They might be thought of as a married couple." In Act One, Estragon speaks gently to his friend, approaching him slowly and laying a hand on his shoulder. After asking for his hand in turn and telling him not to be stubborn, he suddenly embraces him but backs off just as quickly, complaining, "You stink of garlic!" Estragon in particular is "highly excited", in contrast with Vladimir, who chooses this moment to talk about shrieking mandrake. His apparent indifference to his friend's arousal may be viewed as a sort of playful teasing. Another instance of homoeroticism could be when Estragon “sucks the end of it (the carrot)”. Since the setting is all male without any room for interpretation of any characters being female, homo eroticism can be more apparent in the readings of this work.

The ‘waiting’ which is shown throughout the play is likened to man’s perennial waiting for one or the other desired object. Estragon is complaining and sleeping most of the time, Vladimir is also complaining. Man is always complaining and most of the time there is no action on his part to better the situation. Many have linked this drama to Freudian theory of Id, Ego and Superego. Estragon represents Id, Vladimir- Ego and Godot- Superego. There is another way of approaching Ego in this play, one can consider Pozzo as the symbol of Ego. Beckett has given us a caricature of God, the absolute monarchy. Pozzo is the living symbol of establishment. Life is occupied by waiting. In Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett presents the suffering of the human condition; the two characters exemplify this condition of suffering through the juxtaposition of inaction and complaining. The term ‘waiting’ definitely well describes the nature of this play, taking part in every component of the play. In the play, the characters work collectively as a mind of their own in proceeding to contradict yet balance out one another’s actions as the course of the play goes on. Waiting for Godot is a mere interpretation of Sigmund Freud’s ideology of the mind. Role of Estragon: Go-go is the Ego in the play according to University Distinguished Professor Bernard Dukore but rather than being a complete mediate between the Id and Superego (The contrasts which make up the ego), he has more of a Superego approach, yet Estragon is still fulfilling his role as the Ego. “The rational Go-go embodies the incomplete Ego, the missing pleasure principle: (e)go-(e)go.” Stated Bernard Dukore when talking about his thoughts on the Freudian interpretation of ego in the play, ‘Waiting for Godot’, “This is one way to look at the play, the other point of view interprets Pozzo as the keeper of ego. Pozzo appears on stage after the appearance of Lucky. They are tied together by a long rope; thus, their destinies are fixed together in the same way that Pozzo might be a mother figure, with the rope being the umbilical cord which ties the two together. Everything about Pozzo resembles our image of the circus ringmaster. If the ringmaster is the chief person of the circus, then it is no wonder that Vladimir and Estragon first mistook him for Godot or God. Like a ringmaster, he arrives brandishing a whip, which is the trademark of the professional. In fact, we hear the cracking of Pozzo's whip before we actually see him. Also, a stool is often associated with an animal trainer, and Pozzo constantly calls Lucky by animal terms or names. Basically, Pozzo commands and Lucky obeys. In the first act, Pozzo is immediately seen in terms of this authoritarian figure. He lords over the others, and he is decisive, powerful, and confident. He gives the illusion that he knows exactly where he is going and exactly how to get there. He seems "on top" of every situation. When he arrives on the scene and sees Vladimir and Estragon, he recognizes them as human, but as inferior beings; then he condescendingly acknowledges that there is a human likeness, even though the "likeness is an imperfect one." This image reinforces his authoritarian god-like stance: we are made in God's image but imperfectly so. Pozzo's superiority is also seen in the manner in which he eats the chicken, then casts the bones to Lucky with an air of complete omnipotence. In contrast to the towering presence exhibited by Pozzo in Act I, a significant change occurs between the two acts. The rope is shortened, drawing Pozzo much closer to his antithesis, Lucky. Pozzo is now blind; he cannot find his way alone. He stumbles and falls. He cannot get along without help; he is pathetic. He can no longer command. Rather than driving Lucky as he did earlier, he is now pathetically dragged along by Lucky. From a position of omnipotence and strength and confidence, he has fallen and has become the complete fallen man who maintains that time is irrelevant and that man's existence is meaningless. Unlike the great blind prophets of 'yore who could see everything for Pozzo, ‘The things of time are hidden from the blind.’ Ultimately, for Pozzo, man's existence is discomforting and futile, depressing, and gloomy and, most of all, brief and to no purpose. The gravedigger is the midwife of mankind: They give birth astride the grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more."From all this we can understand that Pozzo is the symbol of Ego in the play.”

Essay submitted by- Ankita, Kinjal, Batul, Neerja and Jyutika (TYBA, Lit 2016-17 Batch)