Book Blog Two- Waiting for Godot pages 12-24
The most puzzling collection of dialog I have ever read begins this section of the book. It starts with this: ‘Vladimir-What do we do when we are waiting?, Estragon- What about hanging ourselves.’ This line comes out of nowhere. What follows is even more absurd: ‘Vladimir-Hmm. It’d give us an erection; Estragon- An erection!; Vladimir: With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow. That is why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you know that?’ These series of lines took me a while to figure out or at least develop a theory. I started by researching the physical results of hanging yourself. Hanging yourself may in fact induce an erection (according to a few semi-reliable web sources) but ejaculation is not mentioned as much. I think that what Samuel Beckett was trying to say in this section, up to ‘With all that follows’, can mean a number of things: That human beings would kill themselves to satisfy their lust and their drive to obtain momentary pleasure; That the two men are literally bored to death from waiting so long and that self-preservation is no longer important; or That they are simply crazed by the idea of a resolution, that they are tired of waiting for death to come and tired of waiting for Godot to come meet them. Then comes the dialog about the mangrove. I also did some research on the mangrove to help make sense of this line. Mangroves are a Mediterranean flower with many humanlike qualities. It is also used as a narcotic and a psychological healer. Its roots are shaped like little humans and they do indeed sheik when they are pulled from the ground. Vladimir is saying that by ejaculating on the ground, they are giving birth to a human-like life form that is afraid of death, or that is horrified in how it was birthed (I want to emphasize this though I do not want to explain this), a small screaming and scared human. Samuel, I believe, had intended to mean even more than that. Perhaps Samuel means that human birth is, a lot of a time, a result of boredom and that it is our erotic sex drive that made us dominant and so widely dispersed across the globe. If humans were not produced at the rate in which they were, we would probably not thrive the way we did (or perhaps I’m reading into this too much).
In this research frenzy, I also took upon the task of figuring out what the main characters names mean. Estagon was slightly interesting (but it was probably unintentional). I knew from geometry class that the suffix gon means “sided”. I looked up what the prefix est meant and found that it means “most”. Together it means “most sided” (ra isn’t a suffix). Perhaps this is a clue to what kind of character Estragon is. It could mean that he is a faceless, identity-less meanderer; or that he is open minded and seeking truth. Vladimir doesn’t have any significance or encrypted meaning but maybe it is a reference to Vladimir Lenin since he was an important and controversial figure during the time period that Waiting for Godot was written.
For the next few pages the dialog is just turbulent arguments and comical bickering about who would hang themselves first. Gotta love dark humor! Then we are confronted with the problem of Godot and what he is. They compromise to ask Godot for guidance about the whole hanging thing when they meet with him later. In the next few pages we learn a lot about Godot and its characteristics. We learn that Godot is somewhat of a Buddha and is able to lead people in the right path. We learn that Godot has a home, family friends, agents, correspondents, books and bank account so my early prediction that Godot is some kind of god is most likely false.
The most puzzling collection of dialog I have ever read begins this section of the book. It starts with this: ‘Vladimir-What do we do when we are waiting?, Estragon- What about hanging ourselves.’ This line comes out of nowhere. What follows is even more absurd: ‘Vladimir-Hmm. It’d give us an erection; Estragon- An erection!; Vladimir: With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow. That is why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you know that?’ These series of lines took me a while to figure out or at least develop a theory. I started by researching the physical results of hanging yourself. Hanging yourself may in fact induce an erection (according to a few semi-reliable web sources) but ejaculation is not mentioned as much. I think that what Samuel Beckett was trying to say in this section, up to ‘With all that follows’, can mean a number of things: That human beings would kill themselves to satisfy their lust and their drive to obtain momentary pleasure; That the two men are literally bored to death from waiting so long and that self-preservation is no longer important; or That they are simply crazed by the idea of a resolution, that they are tired of waiting for death to come and tired of waiting for Godot to come meet them. Then comes the dialog about the mangrove. I also did some research on the mangrove to help make sense of this line. Mangroves are a Mediterranean flower with many humanlike qualities. It is also used as a narcotic and a psychological healer. Its roots are shaped like little humans and they do indeed sheik when they are pulled from the ground. Vladimir is saying that by ejaculating on the ground, they are giving birth to a human-like life form that is afraid of death, or that is horrified in how it was birthed (I want to emphasize this though I do not want to explain this), a small screaming and scared human. Samuel, I believe, had intended to mean even more than that. Perhaps Samuel means that human birth is, a lot of a time, a result of boredom and that it is our erotic sex drive that made us dominant and so widely dispersed across the globe. If humans were not produced at the rate in which they were, we would probably not thrive the way we did (or perhaps I’m reading into this too much).
In this research frenzy, I also took upon the task of figuring out what the main characters names mean. Estagon was slightly interesting (but it was probably unintentional). I knew from geometry class that the suffix gon means “sided”. I looked up what the prefix est meant and found that it means “most”. Together it means “most sided” (ra isn’t a suffix). Perhaps this is a clue to what kind of character Estragon is. It could mean that he is a faceless, identity-less meanderer; or that he is open minded and seeking truth. Vladimir doesn’t have any significance or encrypted meaning but maybe it is a reference to Vladimir Lenin since he was an important and controversial figure during the time period that Waiting for Godot was written.
For the next few pages the dialog is just turbulent arguments and comical bickering about who would hang themselves first. Gotta love dark humor! Then we are confronted with the problem of Godot and what he is. They compromise to ask Godot for guidance about the whole hanging thing when they meet with him later. In the next few pages we learn a lot about Godot and its characteristics. We learn that Godot is somewhat of a Buddha and is able to lead people in the right path. We learn that Godot has a home, family friends, agents, correspondents, books and bank account so my early prediction that Godot is some kind of god is most likely false.
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