Word: godot
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...alienation of affections in a headline scandal. He marries her, has two kids, continues as a Broadway star, gets on TIME'S cover but can't make it really big in radio, TV or movies (except for Oz). He wins a huge artistic success in Waiting for Godot as his stage career dims, and finally -oh, irony-makes the biggest money of his life ($75,000 a year) pushing Lay's Potato Chips on TV commercials. Until at final fadeout with cancer (his hypochondriac nightmare come true), nurse bends over and sees him inaudibly whispering...
...conventions he is parodying. In one disarming aside to the reader, Fowles argues that the Victorian novelist, aided by his assumed omniscience, patted life into artificial patterns and robbed characters of reality. While the Victorians believed that "the novelist stands next to God," Fowles takes his stand next to Godot. He proclaims that the novelist's first principle is the "freedom that allows other freedoms to exist," namely those of his characters. To illustrate the point, he twice ties up his narrative strands in tidy traditional endings, then backs up and unwinds them again in tangled, less conclusive...
...mood of Beckett's plays and novels is traumatic loss, a vestigial memory of the expulsion from Eden. With elegiac melancholy, Beckett intones a kyrie eleison without God. Waiting for Godot is hope's requiem. The two tramps Estragon and Vladimir wait in vain...
...shades (now replaced by granny glasses) in three dimensions. David Hockney portrayed him as a prim, vested, bearded presence on a purple sofa. George Segal cast him in the ghostly, ghastly plaster that is his specialty, a dilapidated figure who looks for all the world to be waiting for Godot...
...Lord Chamberlain ran head-on into the New Morality in his traditional role as censor of plays, protected Britons from histrionic homosexuality by barring such plays as Tea and Sympathy and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof from the London stage and emasculated Beckett's Waiting for Godot on grounds of blasphemy...