by Mary Beth
In Waiting for Godot, Beckett distorts time by eliminating the characters’ attachment to time and time’s measure. Time becomes a relative measure. It is not discrete, like it is in reality:
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- ESTRAGON:
- What did we do yesterday?
- VLADIMIR:
- What did we do yesterday?
- ESTRAGON:
- Yes.
- VLADIMIR:
- Why . . . (Angrily.) Nothing is certain when you’re about.
- ESTRAGON:
- In my opinion we were here.
- Vladimir speaks about time in a non-definitive way when he says, “On the other hand what’s the good of losing heart now, that’s what I say. We should have thought about it a million years ago, in the nineties.”
- Alejandro said, “Space and time, conjunctively misperceived by Didi and Gogo, are warped and blurred,while functioning detrimentally towards the perception of meaningful action.” Beckett may have thrown out the use of consecutive, constant time in order to help the audience focus on the existing (or non-existing) action of the play.
- The indefinite arrival of Godot is the largest evidence of the play’s purposeful absence of measured time.
ALEJANDRO
Mary Beth,
We are definitely speaking of a play where time is abstract like in real life, where its grotesque distortion manifests a general sense of confussion.
The indiscretion factor you mention is a good observation on the effects time has, both, in the characters and, as it conveys the same sensation through them, in the audience.
“VLADIMIR
Extraordinary the tricks that memory plays!”
Memory is, of course, affected by time distortion. But, as indicated by twilight which happens every day, time doesn’t change; simply, its perception does.