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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...