God?

 “Vladimir: This is becoming really insignificant.
   Estragon: Not enough.” (pg. 76)

What happens when every day seems to blur together, and suddenly you can’t really find the difference between yesterday and today? Even though I have never been as frustrated as the two main characters in Waiting for Godot, I have come to realize that most things we do on a daily basis aren’t significant at all. Furthermore, we constantly seem to be working towards monotony, making everything even less significant than it already was. Just as the two main characters in the play, I have wondered at the reason why we keep working the way we do. It reminds me of the Myth of Sisyphus, and how we strive to do the same thing every day without fail.

Why do we continue working towards nothing? Every day seems to be a repetition of the quotation above, in which we realize that nothing matters, yet we do it. Apparently, it still matters too much.

 The fact that these two men, Vladimir and Estragon, are waiting for Godot is very relevant in the long run of the text. Not only because it dictates the reason that they are still in the same place, but because of what this “Godot” symbolizes. God. Is there really such a thing as a powerful being guiding us through life, or are we just like Estragon and Vladimir, who wait incessantly for him even though he never shows?

“Estragon: And if we dropped him? (Pause.) If we dropped him?
  Vladimir: He’d punish us.” (pg. 107)

Are we really that hopeless? Are we really so insecure in what we are that we wait every single day for a figure which never shows itself in our life? Some say that God is the reason why some people have so much more than others, that this is why we should be thankful. I am thankful, every single day I realize how lucky I have been. But if this is an act of God, why are other people in such bad conditions? If there was a God, wouldn’t people like Estragon and Vladimir, poor and homeless, be better off?

In the end, this book symbolizes the emptiness of every man’s life, and it ridicules our ceaseless search for meaning. It stresses the fact that God has never shown itself and never will. Overall, it could be argued that this book is simply depressing.

 For some reason, I just think it’s realistic. 

The Absurdity of it All

Existence is essentially absurd. This statement may seem radical to certain people, especially those who go through life looking for a reason why they should be doing so.  In the end “…it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten- since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before.” (pg. 71)

This however, doesn’t mean that we must go through life without making any personal attachments. Like Mersault, one is allowed to think of life as a bizarre thing which has no purpose other than our own amusement, and still feel love. This is what Mersault did. He felt love. Even if the character never accepts it, the love he felt for his mother actually began the sequence of events that led to his death.

Many people don’t believe that there was any love in Camu’s character, but the novel itself disproves this hypothesis when the character explains his train of thoughts as he killed the Arab. “It was just the same sort of heat as at my mother’s funeral, and I had the same disagreeable sensations…”  (pg. 38) he says. This past statement proves, not only that Mersault did love his mother and felt badly in her funeral (even if he didn’t weep), but also that an existentialist lifestyle doesn’t necessarily imply a stoic life.

I value my life because it is my one chance to create something amazing, it is the one opportunity I have to try and make it into the scant pages of world history that seem to matter to the human race. The truth is that I probably won’t achieve it. How many Albert Einstein’s exist?

Throughout history we can see various examples of people who, like this acclaimed physicist, made something no one had ever seen before, but, in comparison to the vast amount of people who have gone through their lives without doing anything remarkable, these people are almost non-existent. I am all for finding a meaning within yourself, even if life as a whole never offers one, because with a meaning within us, we can at least enjoy those few moments we have.

Life is a completely random set of events which eventually leads to death. There is nothing more to it, and thus it has no meaning. There is really no point in everyday life, but, as long as you enjoy the meaningless wonders it offers, the absurdity of it all need not make it any less worth living.