Word: godot
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...must love one another or die," wrote W. H. Auden. Fire! proclaims that love is dead, God is dead, and man is dying. The playwright is a onetime actor now living in Europe who has adopted the pseudonym John Roc; he is a demi-Beckett who does not await Godot but screams at the heavens precisely be cause they are empty. He is sometimes pretentious, often confusing, and lavish with lavender words, but his drama rips into an audience with volcanic force...
...Quinn the Eskimo gets here, all the pigeons gonna fly to him." and "When Quinn the Eskimo gets here, everybody's gonna want a doze." The last is a pun on "want a doze." and "want a dose." Of course the whole scene is a lot like Waiting for Godot, which brings in God and religion and which sounds right for Dylan. And maybe H can be a religion. What this song's got in common with the other two is the message in the following lines: "Everybody's building ships and boat; some are building monuments; some are jotting...
...spirit of the book are unwaveringly African. His play, The Road, which won first prize in the first and only Dakar Festival of Negro Arts, is infused with patterns and dialogue reminiscent of Beckett and Pinter, but the message is uniquely African. A kind of African Waiting for Godot, it concerns a group of drivers, thugs, passengers and autoparts scavengers in a broken-down truck who are dominated by an ex-minister awaiting a revelation. The revelation is that the road itself is a god: "The great dusty snake in whose life all their lives are contained, in whose coils...
They kill the time with intellectual vaudeville-puns, word games, syllogistic oneupmanship. As they do so, it becomes apparent that Stoppard owes fully as much to Samuel Beckett as he does to Shakespeare. R. and G. are transparent replicas of the two tramps who wait for Godot. But where Beckett's dialogue almost expires in pauses of resignation, Stoppard's lines pant with inner panic. Delivered with comic ardor at machine-gun speed, R. and G.'s interchanges combine mental verve with spiritual desolation. It is as if the quiz kids of Wittenberg U. found themselves desperate...
...life but not quite into death, "without the courage to end or the strength to go on." Nothing happens; nobody comes, nobody goes. Yet his plays (Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape) and novels (Malloy, Murphy) are metaphors of modern man's spiritual bafflement. "Waiting for Godot" has become a tagline for frustration...