Ways of Waiting in Waiting for Godot
Abstract
The perfect title of a literary work, one might expect, would be, as it is in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a synecdoche, a particularly meaningful part from which the reader could infer the whole. With that in mind, I'd like to trace out some of the implications of Beckett's title. But first let me note a general curiosity about the titles of plays, one that Beckett exacerbates to paradox in his paradoxical work: the simple fact that as compared to those of poems and novels the titles of plays appear in a different mode from the play itself. They are written, not spoken, whereas poems and their titles are both written. A reader first looks into Keats's words "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" before he looks into the words of the poem that appears below it. The one leads naturally into the other, so naturally, indeed, that many titles of poems are simply the first phrases or lines of the poems themselves, as in Keats's "I Stood Tip–Toe. " In this case the title is a synecdoche in fact as well as in figure, an actual part of the poem that stands for the whole and exists both outside and inside it. Such a title is not a verbal microcosm or illuminating abbreviation of the whole but merely a tautology serving as an identifying tag.
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Published In
Modern Drama
Volume 29 • Number 3 • September 1986
Pages: 363 - 375
History
Published in print: September 1986
Published online: 5 April 2013
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Modern Drama 1986 29:3, 363-375
Modern Drama 1986 29:3, 363-375