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Waiting for Godot is an existentialist play. The renowned New York critic Eric Bentiey said so in his review of its first Broadway production in 1956. BBC Radio's head of drama Martin Esslin said so in his influential book The Theater of the Absurd in 1961. The inescapable Grove Press edition of Waiting for Godot, long a staple of North American college English courses, has said so on the back cover for thirty years. Throughout the eighties and nineties, Grove quoted Bendey's remark that Waiting for Godot is "the quintessence of 'existentialism'" on more than fifty printings. Sometime after the 110th printing in 1998, Bentiey's claim gave way to the anonymous statement of Grove's current copy: "Beckett's language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existentialism of postWorld War II Europe."
That's a lot of -isms. My quarrel is with the last: its reputation notwithstanding, Waiting for Godot is not really an existentialist play. In 1961, Theodor Adorno said as much about Beckett's work in general in Noten zur Literatur II, but he used Endgame instead of Godot as his example - and worse, he said it in German, so no one in North America even heard him.
Beckett's best-known play is existentialist in the sense that Bentley used the term in his review, before Grove cut him short. Bentley actually wrote that Waiting for Godot "is the quintessence of 'existentialism' in the popular, and most relevant, sense of the term." From that, I gather Bentiey thought Waiting for Godot fit a vague sense of what mattered about existentialism in the 1950s: "a philosophy," as he went on to say,
which underscores the incomprehensibility, and therefore the meaninglessness, of the universe, the nausea which man feels upon being confronted with the fact of existence, the praiseworthiness of the acts of defiance man may perform - acts which are taken, on faith, as self-justifying, while rationally speaking, they have no justification because they have no possibility of success.
As a summary of existentialism, that begins well but ends too cynically. It describes Beckett's play, or a reading of Beckett's play, better than it does the philosophy of Sartre, the existentialist philosopher Bentley s language most clearly calls to mind. In short, the quintessence of popular existentialism...