Waiting for Godot Character Comparison
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot depicts two vagabonds, Vladimir and Estragon, as its central characters: to the extent that the play's structure accommodates a traditional protagonist, one of them -- or both considered as a unit -- must be that protagonist. Yet I think Beckett is careful to give us reason both to understand Vladimir and Estragon (within their own interactions) as being more distinct characters, while at the same time we can see them as the same character with the same name. I'd like to look at the evidence of a few crucial moments in Beckett's text, in which the distinctions between Vladimir and Estragon are either heightened or elided, in order ultimately to argue as to why I think we must understand the two characters as a unit, and to some degree as the same character with the same name.
At the play's outset, we see a contrast between Estragon engaged in activity (trying to remove his ill-fitting boot, which has injured his foot) while Vladimir idly engages in chit-chat, speculating about suicide:
VLADIMIR:
(gloomily). It's too much for one man. (Pause. Cheerfully.) On the other hand what's the good of losing heart now, that's what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties.
ESTRAGON:
Ah stop blathering and help me off with this bloody thing.
VLADIMIR:
Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first. We were respectable in those days. Now it's too late. They wouldn't even let us up. (Estragon tears at his boot.) What are you doing?
Here he indicates a long foregrounding for his own relationship with Estragon -- tracing it back to the belle epoque 1890's in Paris, when Gustave Eiffel's tower was still a new structure, and so they might have committed suicide by leaping off it together ("hand in hand from the top") and been "among the first" to utilize the structure as a suicide leap. But after Estragon has removed the boot, we get the first indication that there is a distinct difference in the two characters, one that Beckett will emphasize repeatedly. It is worth taking a look at this moment in closer detail:
ESTRAGON:
Nothing.
VLADIMIR:
Show me.
ESTRAGON:
There's nothing to show.
VLADIMIR:
Try and put it on again.
ESTRAGON:
(examining his foot). I'll air it for a bit. VLADIMIR:
There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet. (He takes off his hat again, peers inside it, feels about inside it, knocks on the crown, blows into it, puts it on again.) This is getting alarming. (Silence. Vladimir deep in thought, Estragon pulling at his toes.) One of the thieves was saved. (Pause.) It's a reasonable percentage. (Pause.) Gogo.
For a start, this passage indicates the larger motif enacted throughout the play that, when they are alone together, the default relationship between the two characters is for Vladimir to play the parental or senior role, and Estragon play the child-like or junior role. Here Vladimir admonishes Estragon, like he were a son or a younger sibling. But at the same time, there is an introduction of a symbolic leitmotif in the actual text which is also designed to shore up our sense of the paradoxical similarities between the two characters: this is subtly introduced in Vladimir's seeming nonsequitur, while watching Estragon "pulling at his toes," musing "One of the thieves was saved…It's a reasonable percentage." We are meant to recognize this as an allusion to the account of Christ's crucifixion in the New Testament, in which at least one Gospel account specifies that Christ would be crucified between two thieves (Dismas and Gestas) who were on the crosses to either side of Christ's own on the hill of Golgotha. Christian tradition holds that "one of the thieves was saved," as Vladimir puts it -- Gestas, repenting at the last moment of his life, supposedly begged forgiveness and recognized Jesus as the son of God, which guaranteed his redemption and entry into heaven. The sternest Christian expositor of the doctrine of Original Sin, Saint Augustine, would use the Gospel story of the two thieves as an indication of the via media that humans should pursue in their awareness both of the ingrained nature of human sin and the perpetual nature of divine mercy: Augustine would write, "Do not despair, for one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume, for one of the thieves was damned." To some extent, this introduces a sense of profound difference into Beckett's...
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