Similarities Between Pirandello and Beckett
By: Janna • Essay • 682 Words • November 9, 2009 • 1,177 Views
Essay title: Similarities Between Pirandello and Beckett
Like in Pirandello, in Samuel Beckett we can find similar themes. He was one of the greatest playwriters of the 20th century of the "theater of the absurd", which is a new and original kind of theatre that breaking all the rules and structure of the classical plays, it intends to express the absurdity, and the meaningless of life, Beckett develop themes like the sterility of life, he lack of communication or the crisis of the individualism, which are all present in the Pirandellian plays. Like all the plays they are inspired by the vision of the play writer of the world, in Beckett's case he lived the two world wars, and after the IInd world war he saw that life didn't have meaning, so he started to write what he saw. He received different influences, but mostly are the philosophical theories of Nietzsche (God is Dead) and Freud. One of the best known play of the theatre of the absurd and containing all the previous themes is the play "Waiting For Godot", which is one of the plays that Beckett wrote, created originally in 1952 in French(En Attendant Godot)and translated in English in 1954,that narrates the story of two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, that are waiting for a mysterious man named Godot, and occasionally other two characters appear in the scene, Pozzo and Lucky, master and servant, one receiving orders from the other, and at the end of every act a boy comes and tells the two tramps that Godot will not come that evening, but maybe tomorrow. The whole play is set in simple scene, a road, some rocks and a tree, and it is divided in just two acts, in contrast with the typical five act of the classical play. Analyzing the plot of the play is hard to determine a beginning and a end, because nothing happened in the play, we could say that it has a circular structure, it begins with the two tramps waiting and end with the same scene, the only difference is that the tree, in the 2nd act, have a couple of leaves, but it hasn't a concrete structure. The two main characters are opposite from each other, one, Vladimir, represents the intellect, and the other, Estragon represents the body, there's a lack of communication between the two characters, the dialogues are mostly without a real argument, they talk because in that way time will pass, the two of them act clownish because of