When the Paris curtain opened in 1953, the audience found themselves facing a minimalist setting with a tree and nothing else. The first view of "Waiting for Godot" suggests that its darkest tones are presented by Beckett through visual sadness and that the overall metaphysical state of the characters is placed. Parallels can already be drawn between this setting and the inevitably similar image of TS Eliot's "The Wasteland". : “A pile of broken images, where the sun beats down and the dead tree gives no shelter” Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The only resemblance to the audience's world is the tree and the road the characters are on. This setting creates a brooding despair; the roads represent journeys and an option to move away, or towards something and yet the characters do not move, in effect stating “We cannot (leave)” (i). The tree, another prop of seemingly monumental importance to the rest of the desert scene, represents hope and life despite the absence of hope and life passing away. Beckett demands that the tree have leaves during Act 2, which symbolizes spring for the audience while Vladimir and Estragon realize that there is no hope at all. It is no exaggeration to claim that Beckett had a taste for deeply depressing irony and that he plays with elements of comedy and tragedy most aptly through dramatic staging. However, I think Beckett creates some of the most comedic and darkest parts of the performance through his unerring ability to manipulate language. In the first act, the words "Nothing to be done" (ii) are spoken by both Estragon and Vladimir and this statement becomes a crucial philosophy throughout the play, of the same importance as "We are waiting for Godot" (iii ). The audience initially finds the phrase laughing out loud funny because it is associated with the physical sequence of Estragon, who is "trying to take off his boot" (iv) who, after an exhausting battle, concedes and explains to the public that there is “nothing to be done”. do'. The subtle brilliance of this phrase lies in its most familiar sound, which appeals to all audiences because they can understand that a menial task has become so extraordinarily difficult that they see no way to solve it. It's laughable that a complex human being can't actually remove a boot, that somehow the boot beat the human and now he's defeated...by a boot. This struggle is universal and appeals to the audience by asking the underlying question: why does Estragon assume the boot is fake? Beckett thus highlights the arrogance and pomposity of humanity. Vladimir is the messenger of this question when he says to Estragon: “There are men everywhere who blame their boots for the fault of their feet” (v). This phrase contains many topics of debate because the bootmaker made the boot perfect, as in the bootmaker thought it had no defects otherwise he would not have sold it, similarly we are all in the image of God, surely Estragon can't have any faults either, so who is it wrong... God or man? After the comical moment, Vladimir introduces nuances of suffering when he explains that he too “rallies to this opinion”. Although the phrase seems harmless enough, Vladimir interprets it away from Estragon as he stares into space, implying that he is unaware of Estragon's physical struggle and his response is actually more metaphysical. This exchange allows Beckett to introduce the brutal truth about the character's situation: there is literally nonothing to do. This fits with Esslin's theory that "Waiting for Godot" contains "a sense of metaphysical anguish at the absurdity of the human condition" (vi). The characters are trapped in this barren and featureless setting, waiting for someone they cannot define because they "would not know him if I saw him" (vii), incapable of having the slightest influence on the processes which govern their lives. Through his exploitation of language Beckett also challenges the way humanity operates in the world and, ultimately, how the play's disjointed and confusing plot parallels our place in the universe. In “Waiting for Godot”, a conversation that exploits the functioning of humanity is: “Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to make us feel like we exist. Vladimir: Yes, yes, we are magicians. » (viii) The audience finds this hilarious because of Estragon's optimism in the face of his predicament and the sudden change in mood one can observe on stage is also humorous because it is so abstract and unwarranted. The added element of Vladimir's rejection of Estragon's comment and rejection of optimism is a nice contrast that makes the audience laugh, but also supports the hypothesis that this is a double act and completely dependent from each other. Another great example of this double act is: “Vladimir: What are they saying? Estragon: They talk about their lives. Vladimir: Living is not enough for them. Estragon: They need to talk about it. ” (ix) The double act is vital as a means of exploiting language and the assertion that “the two most important sets of characters in the play occur in pairs” (x). A 1953 audience would have recognized the silhouettes of Laurel and Hardy in Estragon and Vladimir, making their world closer to the audience's, but still miles away. In this passage, Beckett's double act technique is updated to emphasize the existentialist nature of humanity and our need to rationalize individual experience by explaining it to others. The characters complete each other's sentences, giving the impression of thinking so that the audience understands that Beckett wants them to think about the short conversation. The word “magician” has the darkest connotations as it carries ideas of illusion and deception. Beckett therefore wants to show the audience that our attempts to maintain the logic by which we exist are actually a form of deception; a skill we have learned over the years but which is false. This eloquent point fits into the history of the movement following World War II (which Beckett lived through) in which society believed to be in decline. We could no longer count on the comforts that helped them move forward in their lives, like order. The comedy still remains in a dark view of society because the characters live in a world that they claim to understand, but in reality they don't. There is a style of dramatic irony at work as the audience looks at the kingdom of Estragon, Lucky, Pozzo and Vladimir with arrogance as it understands things that the characters do not, such as the fact that Godot does not will not happen. It is interesting to note that the world created by the theater stage would examine the world of the audience with the same arrogance, because it knows things that the audience does not know, which is what Beckett is trying to explain to us; the audience doesn't understand the nature of his world as well as they think they do. However, it could be argued that only the dark undertones come from the manipulation of language and the comedy comes from the visual presentation of the character to the audience. One critic states: "The stage directions of the play constitute almost half the text, which suggests that the ». 12