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Seagull as an image: Every character in the play identifies with the seagull in some way or the other. Seagull for Treplev signifies Nina’s cold and harsh treatment towards him; he tries to explain how and why he symbolizes himself with the Seagull while she tries to explain she doesn’t understand it. It foreshadows the end of the play by showing how Treplev will actually commit suicide. For Nina, it shows how she will always be in the future, when Trigorin discovers the gull he says: “A young girl… loves the lake the way a seagull does, and she's happy and free as a seagull. Then a man comes along, sees her, and ruins her life because he has nothing better to do. Destroys her like this seagull here.” It represents how she will be forgotten about in the future by him and how her life is ruined by the man she loved. Towards the end of the play she is completely forgotten about like the gull Trigorin asked to stuff. Lake as an image: The lake at the beginning of the play is ob...

Samuel Beckett, the most eminent Irish playwright wrote ‘’Waiting for Godot’’ in French in 1949 and then translated it into English in 1954. This play has been performed as a drama of the absurd with astonishing success in Europe, America and the rest of the world in the post second world war era. For this reason, Martin Esslin calls it, “One of the successes of the post-war theatre” (Esslin, Martin, 1980) In this play, the two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait expectantly to see a man simply known as Godot, a character who does not make an appearance in the play, despite being the titular character. The play begins with waiting for Godot and ends with waiting for Godot. Marxism refers to the political and economic theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, later developed by their followers to form the basis of communism. Marxism introduced ideas such as Dialectical Materialism, Alienation, and Economic Determination. Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ has a minimalist setting...

Critically analyzing Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ with respect to Russian Formalism.  According to Russian formalism, any work of literature can be read as a form oriented work. It should be of an autonomous domain, in an enclosed universe and not related to extrinsic systems. To a Russian formalist, form and meaning are inseparable and no literary work is insignificant. We are going to employ techniques like close reading, de-familiarization, construction of language, structure and the Boris Tomashevsky approach to analyse the play Waiting for Godot with respect to Russian formalism. Russian formalists majorly look into the structure of a literary work as one of its key critical components. The play is divided into two acts with identical action and setting. The almost identical acts suggest a repetitive cycle which continues throughout the play. Waiting for Godot is a tragicomedy play of an absurdist nature containing a dominant theme of existentialism. Being an a...

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 hap...