Failure of Comedy in Waiting for Godot

Authors

  • Hind Naji Hussein Ithawi University of Baghdad, College of Languages, Department of English Language

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.36586/jcl.2.2020.0.42.0118

Keywords:

comedy, tragicomedy, meaninglessness, performance, futility

Abstract

Many critics suggest that Beckett’s early plays are comic because they focus their analyses on the use comic elements. Waiting for Godot is one of Beckett’s early plays, and it has been heavily analyzed and read as a comic text partly because its subtitle is “a tragicomedy in two acts” and also because of the comic techniques used in the play. The present paper, however, attempts to read the play as a piece in which comedy fails to produce any effects on the characters who remain apparently very desperate and frustrated throughout the play. The characters perform different comic acts, but they do not really feel amused or entertained. The paper suggests that the acts these characters put on stage are only means to pass time and avoid thinking about their predicament. The paper thus does not reject the comic reading of the play, but consider it a partial reading that does not capture the different dimensions of this text.

Author Biography

  • Hind Naji Hussein Ithawi, University of Baghdad, College of Languages, Department of English Language

    Dr. Hind Naji Hussein Ithawi got her B.A. in English Language and Literature form the Department of English/ College of Languages/ University of Baghdad in 1998. She got her M. A. from the same institution in 2001. She got her PhD. from the Department of English/ College of Liberal Arts/ University of Texas at Austin in 2018. Her areas of interest include modern American drama, race and ethnicity, performance studies, feminist studies, American and English Literature, and third world literature.

    [email protected]Email:

     

Downloads

Published

2020-06-01

Issue

Section

Department of English language

How to Cite

Failure of Comedy in Waiting for Godot. (2020). Journal of the College of Languages (JCL), 42, 118-132. https://doi.org/10.36586/jcl.2.2020.0.42.0118

Publication Dates