"There are those who can only find satisfaction visually. As far as I'm concerned , and doubtless this is my misfortune , I can only escape with my eyelids closed ."

... they'll be there saying the same thing till they die , then perhaps a little silence , till the next gang arrives on the site , I alone am immortal ...

Physical pain , on the contrary , seemed to help him greatly. And one day rolling up the leg of his trousers , he showed Macmann his shin covered with bruises , scars , and abrasions. Then producing smartly a hammer from an inside pocket he delt himself , right in the middle of his ancient wounds , so violent a blow that he fell down backwards , or perhaps I should say forwards. But the part he struck most readily , with his hammer , was the head , and that is understandable , for it too is a bony part , and sensitive , and difficult to miss , and the seat of all the shit and misery , so you can rain blows upon it , with more pleasure than on the leg for example , which never did you any harm. It's only human.

… and having heard … that when a man in a forest thinks he is going in a straight line , in reality he is going in a circle , I did my best to go in a circle , hoping in this way to go in a straight line. For I stopped being half-witted and became sly , whenever I took the trouble. And my head was a storehouse of useful knowledge. And if I did not go in a rigorously straight line , with my system of going in a circle , at least I did not go in a circle , and that was something.

And then another night fall and another man come and Watt go , Watt who is now come , for the coming is in the shadow of the going and the going is in the shadow of the coming , that is the annoying part about it. And yet there is one who neither comes nor goes , I refer I need hardly say to my late employer , but seems to abide in his place , for the time being at any rate , like an oak , and elm , a beech or an ash , to mention only the oak , the elm , the beech and the ash , and we nest a little while in his branches.

They say , That is not his life , he does not live on that. They don't see me , they don't see what my life is , they don't see what I live on , and they say , That is not his life , he does not live on that.

Till feeling the need for company again he tells himself to call the hearer M at least. For readier reference. Himself some other character. W. Devising it all himself included for company.

The two thieves are Didi and Gogo; the two thieves are Pozzo and Lucky; the two thieves are you and me. And the play is shaped to reflect that fearful symmetry.

Beckett’s notorious riposte to the question of Godot’s identity. "If I knew," Beckett said, "I would have said so in the play."

The words of [German theologian] Paul Tillich in The Shaking of the Foundations (1948) are strikingly parallel to, almost a gloss on, the content of the play:

. . . Significantly, Beckett has noted that the key word in his play is : " perhaps " .

Beckett to Pinter :

" I was in the hospital once. There was a man in another ward, dying of throat cancer. In the silence I could hear his screams continually. That's the only kind of form my work has . "

A tantalising gloss on the material "thereness" of Beckett’s world comes from Chekhov, in a 1904 letter to Olga Knipper: "You ask : What is life? That is just the same as asking: What is a carrot? A carrot is a carrot, and nothing more is known about it".

Such a chain of thought inevitably pushes us forward to the end of life :

This "final term", for Sartre, if it ever came, would be God.

"If I am a waiting for waitings for waiting and if suddenly the object of my final waiting and the one who awaits it are suppressed, the waiting takes on retrospectively the character of absurdity" (Sartre, Being and Nothingness).

When asked about the contradiction which must exist if one continues to write under the conviction that language cannot convey a meaning, Beckett replied, "Que voulez-vous, Monsieur? C’est les mots; on n’a rien d’autre." [What do you want? They are words, we have nothing else.]

For Beckett it is the writing , not the writer nor the reader, the ultimately matters :

Beckett in interview :

I speak of an art . . . weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing , of going a little further along a dreary road.

. . . [a] real-life influence on Beckett’s work . . . came in 1938. As Beckett walked along a Paris street, a panhandler stabbed him in the chest, perforating a lung and narrowly missing the heart. When Beckett later asked why the attack happened, the assailant replied, "I don’t know, sir." That glimpse of the random perils of existence may be confirmed Beckett’s dark vision but did not initiate it.

He is the wastelander of all wastelanders. After journeying through Beckett country, the land of Eliot - with its lidless eyes, picked bones, stony places and rats slithering through vegetation - seems almost a resort, a Cannes, a White Sulphur Springs of literary vision. Beckett offers perhaps the narrowest range in modern literature and the most unrelieved landscape. To him, only a single human datum appears of real interest - that we are born to die. "They give birth astride of a grave," as Pozzo says in "Waiting for Godot," "the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more." From his earliest work through his most recent, Beckett has viewed life as a terminal illness.

. . . One commentator has suggested that it is through meeting Vladimir and Estragon that Pozzo loses his contact with time. Certainly his attitude to it changes during the course of the action.

. . . The three constant, contradictory complaints in Beckett’s work are that time doesn’t pass at all but stays around us, like a continuum, that it passes to slowly, and that too much of it passes.

. . . Beckett’s characters . . . must wait forever, without any prospect of ultimate salvation, condemned to "wander the last of the living in the depths of an instant without bounds". In Waiting for Godot, it is always evening, before sunset and moonrise; . . . Accompanying the temporal limbo is a physical stasis that gradually but relentlessly increases. Gogo and Didi are rooted to a single spot, a country road with a tree, . . .

Alain Robbe-Grillet, in discussing Waiting for Godot, explains the revolution purpose and effect of Beckett’s tragicomedy:

Martin Esslin writes that the play became successful with the general public not because most people understood or sympathized with the play, but because of novelty :

Was it not an outrage that people could be asked to come and see a play that could not be anything but a hoax, a play in which nothing whatever happened! People went to see the play just to be able to see that scandalous impertinence with their own eyes and to be in a position to say at the next party that they had actually been the victims of that outrage. (quoted in Bair 64)

. . . What we are laughing at here is for the most part limitations in both the physical and intellectual domains. Our laughter in these cases may be classified as social because we are in agreement concerning the subject for laughter.

The basic questions for Beckett seemed to be these: How can we come to terms with the fact that, without ever having asked for it, we have been thrown into the world, into being? And who are we; what is the true nature of our self? What does a human being mean when he says "I"?

Since man is a rational being and cannot imagine that his being thrown into any situation should or could be entirely pointless, the two vaguely assume that their presence in the world, represented by an empty stage with a solitary tree, must be due to the fact that they are waiting for someone.

When, in 1969, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, he accepted the award but declined the trip to Stockholm to avoid the public speech at the ceremonies.

It was during his days as an English teacher in Paris that he became absorbed into the literary circle that surrounded Irish expatriate James Joyce. Around that time Beckett found his literary vision. "I accepted my despair," he once said. "I didn't try to put an optimistic view on life. To create something that would be easier for readers to accept."

Playwright Israel Horowitz spoke with embarrassment of an encounter with Beckett in the film. He said to the Irish writer, "We live our life in the space where a door opens and closes." " That is quite good ," said Beckett quietly.

Horowitz became frustrated with himself. " Shit! I stole that from you ."

" Shit! " Beckett responded. " I stole that from Dante me-self. "

The last member of our existentialist group is Irish theater-of-the-absurd writer Samuel Beckett. The following is an excerpt from his play Endgame:

The character of Hamm, a blind man who is in some undefined way a superior to the play's other three characters, is throughout the work an example of someone who never feels quite right, and who never knows exactly what is going on in him and around him. Precisely because he is never at ease with himself, never knows himself, Hamm keeps ordering Clov around, hoping that he'll hit upon something Clov can do to give him the sense of inner peace that keeps evading him. He is in some ways like Lucien, the main character of Sartre's "The Childhood of a Leader," who tries out every mode of being he can find in his quest for the one that will fill the void he feels inside him, and who eventually winds up with something destructive and senseless merely because it allows him to pin a label on his self and pretend he knows what it is. What Sartre and Beckett are both trying to say, of course, is that such self-understanding is impossible, and the sooner we accept that, the safer our mental health may be.