Quotes

Paragraph one: Placing Beckett in existential thought

“The inwardness and commitment of the existential thought has expressed itself more
strikingly in imaginative writing than in non-fictional treatises. According to modern
existentialist thinkers, the paradox and absurdity of life can be more readily deduced from
fundamental human situations portrayed in fiction than described in the logical language of
philosophy which is our heritage. Existentialism’s abhorrence of rigid thought systems as being
alien to life and existence has equally pointed toward a preference for poetry and fiction.”
(Edith Kern qtd. in Feldman 3)

Paragraph two: The subject-object relationship

Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written
in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read – or rather it is not only to
be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. (1984, 27)

this method of ‘dissonance’ aims to stage an encounter with what is alien to

language from within language; but this … must by definition entail some
residual form of continued involvement in the phenomenal realm, and must re-
enact – in however attenuated a form – the division between subject and object.
(47)

Thus over nearly a ten-year period, the problematical issue of this subject-object
‘dissonance’, or to employ Mark Nixon’s important description, ‘veil’ between
word and world, was a central challenge to Beckett’s artistic experimentation at
the outset of his writing career.

By not entirely creating bonds with anything, man tries to create himself. By creating himself
the idea of feeling the other becomes alien. In a context in which the interactions with the
other are not only necessary but imperative for the acknowledgment and the realization of
one’s individuality, man develops a craving: by not feeling the other man alienates from his
peers but always trying to find them desperately. It is from this paradigm where we are going
to analyze Waiting for Godot.
“Our fellow man keeps a secret: the secret of what I am. He makes me ‘be’ and, therefore, he
owns me; and this owning is nothing more than the awareness of owning me… Thus the
endeavor of retrieval of myself is fundamentally an endeavor of reabsorption of the Other”
(Sartre, Jean Paul, Being and Nothingness. 454)
It is in this “project of objectification or assimilation of our fellow man”, this craving, where an
objectified image from the other and for the other is created. We feign a concern for the
other, for the “self” that surrounds him, his superficial “self.
One needs the Other for our own realization, for the acknowledgment of one’s individuality;
life in solitude is not feasible. In the assertion “Hell is other people”(Sartre, No exit) is outlined
a response to our interaction with the others: one acknowledges not only that the others exist
but that we exist with them. Is it possible to treat the other like a subject, as a being that has
its own endeavors, as a free being? What does it mean to see the other as a person and not as
a puppet?
Sartre recounts from a memoir: “seeing the other as a puppet would mean seeing him as a
thing among things, in the road three steps from me. Nothing relevant.
If he would be a puppet, his appearance would not modify my relationship with the objects
that surrounds him; but if I see him as a human being, the space and the objects reorganize
around him . When the other enters the scene, his arrival disintegrates the relationships that I
have established with my immediate surroundings. His space accommodates with mine. That
person has stolen my world. The arrival of the other forces me to reinterpret my own world.
(Sartre

(Quote WfG dreams )