Here Vladimir admonishes Estragon, like he were a son or a younger sibling. (Pause.) Gogo.įor a start, this passage indicates the larger motif enacted throughout the play that, when they are alone together, the default relationship between the two characters is for Vladimir to play the parental or senior role, and Estragon play the child-like or junior role. Vladimir deep in thought, Estragon pulling at his toes.) One of the thieves was saved. (He takes off his hat again, peers inside it, feels about inside it, knocks on the crown, blows into it, puts it on again.) This is getting alarming. There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet. It is worth taking a look at this moment in closer detail: But after Estragon has removed the boot, we get the first indication that there is a distinct difference in the two characters, one that Beckett will emphasize repeatedly. Here he indicates a long foregrounding for his own relationship with Estragon - tracing it back to the belle epoque 1890's in Paris, when Gustave Eiffel's tower was still a new structure, and so they might have committed suicide by leaping off it together ("hand in hand from the top") and been "among the first" to utilize the structure as a suicide leap. (Estragon tears at his boot.) What are you doing? Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties.Īh stop blathering and help me off with this bloody thing.
Cheerfully.) On the other hand what's the good of losing heart now, that's what I say. I'd like to look at the evidence of a few crucial moments in Beckett's text, in which the distinctions between Vladimir and Estragon are either heightened or elided, in order ultimately to argue as to why I think we must understand the two characters as a unit, and to some degree as the same character with the same name.Īt the play's outset, we see a contrast between Estragon engaged in activity (trying to remove his ill-fitting boot, which has injured his foot) while Vladimir idly engages in chit-chat, speculating about suicide: Yet I think Beckett is careful to give us reason both to understand Vladimir and Estragon (within their own interactions) as being more distinct characters, while at the same time we can see them as the same character with the same name. Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot depicts two vagabonds, Vladimir and Estragon, as its central characters: to the extent that the play's structure accommodates a traditional protagonist, one of them - or both considered as a unit - must be that protagonist.
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