Филологические науки

ИзвестИя КазУМОиМя
серия «ФИЛОЛОГИЧесКИе НАУКИ» 
180
ISSN 2411-8745
Number 1 (2016), 180 - 185
UDC 821.111
The TheATRe oF The ABSURD AnD ITS FeATUReS on The eXAMpLe 
oF S. BecKeTT’S pLAY “WAITIng FoR goDoT”
Baidildayeva A.,
student of Faculty of translation and philology,
KazUIRandWL named after Ablai khan, Almaty, Kazakhstan
Keywords:
theatre, absurd, playwright, play/Waiting for Godot, Beckett.
Abstract.
The aim of article is to reveal existentialism in Samuel Beckett’s absurdist 
dramas, in the studying of the play to describe characters’ personality and hidden context 
of the play. The scientific novelty is to consider Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot 
from the different points of view such as literature, psychology, religion. In article we 
demonstrate the analysis of the play, present information about search of purpose, seeing 
myself, hopelessness, religious faith. There are fewer researches on this theme at current 
time in our country. The object of the article play “Waiting for Godot” was written in 
French in 1949 and then translated into English in 1954 by the Irish playwright Samuel 
Beckett. This play has been performed as a drama of the absurd with astonishing success in 
Europe, America and the rest of the world in post second world war era.
World War II had left British theatre in a precarious state. In London’s 
West End, about a fifth of the theatres were destroyed or damaged by 
bombing. In the early 1950s the star system dominated the theatre, and 
one of the most prominent dramatists was Terence Rattigan. The classics, 
however, were kept robustly alive by the last of the actor­managers: Sir 
Donald Wolfit, Sir Laurence Olivier (later Lord Olivier), and Sir John 
Gielgud. Olivier and Gielgud were supported by a generation of outstanding 
actors, many of whom had begun their careers in the 1930s and were able to 
adapt to changes in the theatrical climate (as well as to the growth of motion 
pictures and television) through to the 1980 s.
By the mid­1950s, the influence of Brecht was becoming apparent. 
That year marked a turning point in British theatre, with Samuel Beckett’s 
Waiting for Godot (in his own translation) introducing the Theatre of the 
Absurd and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger initiating a new wave of 
antiheroic, “kitchen­sink” dramas. The crash of British colonialism after 
World War 2 brought into being a number of anti­colonial novels. The most 
representative writers of anti­colonial literature are G. Aldridge; N. Lewis; 
D. Stewart; B. Davidson and others. The dominant theme of their novels is 
the struggle of colonial and semi­colonial people for their freedomj [l, 557].
Theatre of the Absurd dramatic works of certain European and 
American dramatists of the 1950s and early ‘60s who agreed with the 
Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus’s assessment, in his essay “The 

ҚазХҚжӘТУ ХАБАРШЫСЫ
«ФИЛОЛОГИЯ ҒЫЛЫМДАРЫ» сериясы
181
ISSN 2411-8745
Number 1 (2016), 180 - 185
Myth of Sisyphus” (1942), that the human situation is essentially absurd, 
devoid of purpose. The term is also loosely applied to those dramatists and 
the production those works. Though no formal Absurdist movement existed 
as such, dramatists as diverse as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Jean 
Genet, Arthur Adamov, Harold Pinter, and a few others shared a pessimistic 
vision of humanity struggling vainly to find a purpose and to control its fate. 
Humankind in this view is left feeling hopeless, bewildered, and anxious.
The ideas that inform the plays also dictate their structure. Absurdist 
playwrights, therefore, did away with most of the logical structures 
of traditional theatre. There is little dramatic action as conventionally 
understood; however frantically the characters perform, their busyness 
serves to underscore the fact that nothing happens to change their existence. 
In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), plot is eliminated, and a timeless, 
circular quality emerges as two lost creatures, usually played as tramps, 
spend their days waiting ­ but without any certainty of whom they are 
waiting for or of whether he, or it, will ever come. Language in an Absurdist 
play is often dislocated, full of cliches, puns, repetitions, and non sequiturs 
[2, 42]. Most absurdist plays have no logical plot. The absence of the plot 
pushes an emphasis on proving the pointless existence of man. Quiet often, 
such plays reveal the human condition at its absolute worst. The Absurdist 
playwrights often used such techniques as symbolism, mime, the circus, 
which are quite evident in the more popular plays of the time.
Existentialism is a philosophical movement that developed in continental 
Europe during the 1800’s and 1900’s. The movement is called existentialism 
because most of its members are primarily interested in the nature of 
existence or being, by which they usually mean human existence. Although 
the philosophers generally considered to be existentialists often disagree 
with each other and sometimes even resent being classified together, they 
have been grouped together because they share many problems, interests, 
and ideas.
Existentialism grew out of the work of two thinkers of the 1800’s: 
Soren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher and Protestant theologian, 
who is generally considered the founder of the movement, and Friedrich 
Nietzsche, a German philosopher. Edmund Husserl, a German philosopher 
not usually considered an existentialist but the founder of his own 
movement, phenomenology, was nevertheless one of the greatest influences 
on existentialism.
The most prominent existentialist thinkers of the 1900’s include the 
French writers Albert Camus, Jean­Paul Sartre, and Gabriel Marcel; the 

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German philosophers Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger; the Russian 
religious and political thinker Nicolas Berdyaev; and the Jewish philosopher 
Martin Buber [3, 446].
The existentialists do not make the traditional attempt to grasp the 
ultimate nature of the world in abstract systems of thoughts. Instead, they 
investigate what it is like to be an individual human being living in the world. 
The existentialists stress the fact that every individual, even the philosopher 
or scientist seeking absolute knowledge, is only a limited human being. 
Thus, every person must face important and difficult decisions with only 
limited knowledge and time in which to make these decisions [3, 447].
Perhaps the greatest living writer in English, and certainly the direct 
follower of James Joyce in many ways, Beckett was born in Dublin, to a 
family of middle­class Protestants. He attended the same school as Oscar 
Wilde, and took a prize degree in Modern Languages at Trinity College, 
Dublin, in 1927. Thereafter he took a post, in Paris, as a visiting lecturer in 
English at the Ecole Normale Superieure. In Paris he met Joyce and became 

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