Beckett the Prophet - The American Scholar

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Beckett the Prophet

We are all, it seems, still waiting for Godot

By Robert Zaretsky<br>July 20, 2026

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Rufus (left) as Estragon and George Wilson as Vladimir in Otomar Krejca's production of Waiting for Godot at the 1978 Festival d'Avignon (Wikimedia Commons)

Every afternoon, I drive to my local YMCA and spend an hour jogging in place on an elliptical machine. At that time of day, I am not in the mood to chat with my neighbors, churning away at their own machines, or even to gaze at the images on the screen before me. I instead turbo-charge my elliptical run and open a book. I am all business.

But a couple of weeks ago, my eyes kept wandering from the book I had brought—a play that my students were reading in one of my classes—to a fellow Y regular. I had noticed her many times before but had not paid her much attention. Wearing the same garb every day—a white and blue sailor’s shirt and baggy, blue jeans—she always circled the gym with small weights in both hands, frequently halting her orbit to chat briefly with another gym member. It was always the same. The width of her gyre never changed.

Her routine, which I first found intriguing, began to make me uneasy. Why did I see her, as if for the first time, only now? It no doubt had something to do with the book I had brought with me that day. As I looked down at one of the dog-eared pages, I reread an exchange between the play’s two principal characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo):

ESTRAGON: Let’s go.

VLADIMIR: We can’t.

ESTRAGON: Why not?

VLADIMIR: We’re waiting for Godot.

[Pause]

Forgive this unsubtle nod to the 20th century’s most influential play, one produced and parodied countless times, commented on in countless books and recast in what seems like countless languages: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Though the play first opened in Paris in 1953, this year marks the 70th anniversary of its American premiere. On January 3, 1956, the curtain went up on the play’s dismal landscape, staged at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami. In an unwitting touch Beckett might have appreciated, the theater had promoted the play as the “laugh sensation of two continents.” By the intermission, more than half the audience had walked out. My guess is that nobody was laughing.

My Beckett epiphany is emblematic of the play’s uncannily prophetic character. All too often, the hawk-nosed Irish writer seems to have scripted our lives and experiences. In the 70 years since the theatrical debacle in Coconut Grove, the world has not only come to terms with the play, it has seemingly become the play. We are all characters on Beckett’s stage. Of course, this happens on an individual scale, as with my afternoon at the Y. But, no less alarmingly, it unfolds on a global scale as well, one where much of the world seems to be waiting, with a mixture of dread and hope, for the arrival of, well … what?

Don’t ask Beckett. Although he wrote the play halfway through a century scored by world wars and cold wars, genocidal regimes and totalitarian ideologies, the poisoning of our natural resources and denaturing of our political discourse, he always insisted that he had nothing to say about contemporary events. This assertion seems reflected in a stage set as blasted and bleak as the dialogues—dialogues that, in subsequent plays, withered into monologues, then drifted into the mute gestures of mimes.

Yet even Beckett, try though he might, could not fully remove himself from the world. As one of his favorite thinkers, Arthur Schopenhauer, observed, Dante mined the material for his Hell from this world of ours. The world of Godot—a bare tree, an empty road, a rocky mound— resembles the world that, a few years earlier hosted concentration camps and incinerated cities, and in our own time has been home to yet more concentration camps and incinerated cities. This is the featureless, colorless vista, fixed by a single tree, that Gogo declares, perhaps ironically, a “charming...