Lucky-Christ
We as people do not take comfort in the strange and forbidding. Because of this, we try to find explanations or personal connections to everything in our experiences. It thus follows that any theatregoer will make an attempt to put the work in front of him or her into familiar terms, much to the dismay of a one Samuel Beckett. His attitude towards critics who attempt to impose values and ideas onto his work (on of utter contempt) is well documented. But he seems to give us no other choice by providing us with very strange and forbidding environments in his theatrical works. Each of these works has a few generally accepted "explanations," none endorsed by Beckett himself. Many critics say that Waiting for Godot (the only one of his theatrical works that I have seen in production, and therefore the only one I am qualified in the least bit to comment on) is wrought with Christian symbolism, especially symbols for a dying Christ. One such symbol is the character of Lucky. Lucky enters the world of Godot on a leash, held and followed by his master, Pozzo. Lucky carries Pozzo's luggage and acts as his slave, completely subservient and sedate, save when he violently lashes out against an attempt to comfort and when he is ord
Lucky therefore seems to make a strong, but depressing, Christ symbol. This dying Christ (and by inference, dying Christianity) is very much in line with Beckett's existential beliefs. The two tramps are lost only because they are waiting for Godot, but Godot never comes. If they were each to take his own existence into his own hands and make something of it, both of them would be able to lead a normal life, but instead they both put their lives in the hands of Godot. Beckett himself was raised a devout Christian, but gave it up after an intense examination of all the implications that such an affiliation had (the Second World War, for example). We might all do well to re-examine our beliefs; Are you waiting for Godot? "That is to say blast hell to heaven so blue still and calm, so calm with a calm that even thought intermittent is better than nothing." As for the words themselves, obviously we hear the "hell," and the "heaven," but we also may take specific note of the repeated "calm," and eventually "nothing." Thus before we even connect the sentence together, we are faced with agony ("hell"), ecstasy ("heaven"), a decrescendo ("calm...calm...calm") and an expiration ("nothing"). This series of events is repeated many times (as well as the reverse) throughout the play by most of the characters and has often been said to have sexual connotations. In this quote we are also faced with a complex set of images. "Hell," and "heaven," together conjure up some kind of conflicting image in most western people, "blue still and calm," seems to suggest a still ocean, an image that is almost the complete opposite of the war and violent imagery of "hell" and "heaven". These Christian images and juxtap
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1158
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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