Beckett vs Satre Essay Example for Free

Beckett vs Satre EssaySamuel Becketts vision of two lowly tramps in the middle of a derelict environment can be placed in direct contrast to the claustrophobic and eternal nightmare presented by Jean-Paul Sartre , but each playwright possessed objectives for their respective audiences and each divided up a valued opinion on the theories of existentialism which can be established in the plays Waiting for Godot and No Exit. Beckett introduces the audience into a world of doubting and surrealist virtues and encourages the spectator to actu totallyy discuss the play and find the answer within. Sartre, however, presents his play as a placard for the virtues of existentialism and attempts to prove that hell is early(a) multitude. When organismness asked about the sources for his ideas or advocating him as a pioneer for the Theatre of the Absurd, Becketts replies were often curt or dismissive. The Theatre of the Absurd was a consideration conceived by the critic Martin Esslin to d escribe the various playwrights who gave their artistic interpretations believing that homo existence is futile and without meaning. According to Beckett himself the Theatre of the Absurd was too judgemental, too self-assuredly bearishI hand over never accepted the notion of a subject area of the absurd, a concept that implies a judgement of value. Its not even affirmable to talk about truth. Thats the part of the anguish. Sartre, however made his existentialist philosophies quite apparent. With his own theories he collaborated with the Dadaists and Surrealists after the Second World War and achieved to make water his own humanist way of thinking but with a prominent atheistic outlook. Sartre quoted rather proudly Lhomme est condamne a etre librelhomme est liberte. Loosely translated he proclaims that Man is condemned to be freeman is freedom. Sartre firmly believed that man is nothing except his life and that consequently he is fully responsible for his actions. In Sartres e xistentialist world, man is committed to choose his own destiny without the help of all religion whether he wants to or not and he made this ism apparent in all of his works, unlike Beckett who used a to a greater extent cryptic or absurd stance in his plays. With or without the use of absurdist ideals and other lines of the genre Beckett certainly portrayed the human values in his reputations and considered the ideas of social conditioning and the existentialist notion of absolute freedom.Of all the ideologies written or philosophised oer , existentialism attends to lend a lot of its virtues to Waiting for Godot. Ronan McDonald argues that absurdity and existence are fundamental to Becketts work There may be more affinity with another association of existentialism and Becketts beliefs, namely the idea of absurdity, though here (too) caution is advised. Without any grounding, without any reason for our being in the world, a certain strand of existentialist thought concludes tha t life is absurd, disordered and meaningless.The absurd, disordered and meaningless which McDonald mentions is evident in the dialogue used in Waiting for Godot. Conversations between the two main characters of Estragon and Vladimir are often erratic and pointless and never seem to resolve at a indwelling climax. They bounce off each other instigating a retort which is unexpected and prompts an audience to laugh at the scenario with confusing intrigue. The dialogue in No Exit, on the other hand is logical and undecomposedified as it relates to the actual settings and situations of the characters.Becketts erratic streams of consciousness that materializes from his characters sometimes make no sense and compared to the confronting and direct pitch in Sartres work, can sometimes be slightly confusing. Sartres characters all have a back story which can be deduced and observe by the dialogue as opposed to the lack of any character history in Waiting for Godot. The audience can concl ude that Estragon, Vladimir and Pozzo, although having different character traits, are all just waiting for Godot but do not know for how long or for what reason.Garcin, Estelle, and Inez in No Exit all have different traits, as does Becketts characters, but their characters are shaped from past despairs, sexuality or front happenings in their lives which have evidently placed them in the hellish scenario in which they find themselves. Because of the situation in Sartres play, the audience can relate themselves to the characters on an empathetic level and create stronger opinions and less suspicious virtues than that of Becketts enigmatic deuce-ace.The despair and degradation towards many civilians during the Second World War became an established influence in both Sartre and Becketts works during their just about prolific period of writing after the conflict. The persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazis occupying Paris and Becketts personal actions within the French safeg uard seemed to have spawned a firm principle and an underlying subtext within his plays. McDonald makes this apparent when he saysIn his post-war career, though his work became ever less connected to a recognisable world, one could say, paradoxically, that it became more political, more shaped by exploitive power relations, edicts handed down from above, secrecy and inscrutability and descriptions of human torment. Many of these influences are undisputable in the relationship between Pozzo and favorable throughout the first act in Waiting for Godot. During be I of the play the abhorrent abuse Pozzo extends towards Lucky and the dismissive way in which he converses with the two slightly passive tramps creates a clear power divide between the characters.Beckett reverses the divide when in Act II Pozzo finds himself in distress and the power is redirected to the two tramps. As Pozzo is struggling helplessly on the floor like an up-ended beetle the two tramps, re intellected of the ch icken bone up they received from him the day before, explain VLADIMIR He wants to get up. ESTRAGONThen let him get up. VLADIMIRHe cant. ESTRAGONWhy not? VLADIMIRI dont know. POZZO writhes, groans, beats the ground with his fists. ESTRAGONWe should ask him for the bone first. Then if he refuses well leave him at that place. VLADIMIRYou mean we have him at our mercy?By using Pozzo as the one in need and the two tramps as the ones who can help, Beckett creates a pessimistic vision of human needfully in a deliciously black pratfall. McDonald agrees when he says Becketts work is notorious for its intense preoccupation with pessimism and human suffering, notwithstanding its bleak smash and darkly acid comedy. Power and conflict can be found aplenty in Sartres hellish hotel room as all tercet characters seem to find themselves guilty of contraventions which have rendered them no better or worse for conscience in the eyes of the audience.Whereas Estragon and Vladimir use repetition an d slapstick to form the basis of comic moments, Sartres characters use no such implements and keep the play solemn throughout. Garcin is the forlorn sadist, Estelle shrugs off her murderous past by being the conceited love-starved damsel and Inez stalks the room as the inert lesbian. Each character submits their own tales of woe and it is evident that none of them has the patience or understanding to take with the others because as soon as a bond occurs between two characters, the third intervenes.Having one man and two women in the room (one of them being a lesbian with a keen eye on the other) sexual frustrations boil over to create various power struggles and along with the inept attempts to befriend or belittle and vexed attitudes on their morbid incarceration, the atmosphere becomes a tense hot-bed of conflict with each character in turn venting their grievance towards another. In Frederick Lumleys New Trends In twentieth Century Drama, he states No love is possible in the pre sence of the third, no end is possible since the three must be together for eternity , neither the knife, poison, rope can enable them to escape this fact.With this fact constantly put forward by Sartre the trios future looks bleakly endless and this inevitable outcome contributes to the rise in tension and conflict. Lumley continues The play presents an endless repetition, a study in monotony which, far from being monotonous, is in fact intensely dramatic and most seducing. Becketts characters in Waiting for Godot all have their own motives and opinions but all seem to be quashed by the ever present threat of Godot appearing. The characters vivid streams of consciousness and erratic conversations take the audience along a confusing and often pointlessnarrative but Beckett seems to relish this as it makes the spectator question the morals and whole raison detre for the piece. Is Godot some sort of religious deity? ar the characters dead and living a life in endless purgatory? Is t he story a tale of class and the power struggle that ensues from it? Becketts aims can be discussed and divulged for years to come and I believe that there is no one conclusive answer, but Eric P. Levy sums up his plays excellently when he says Beckett explores human image as he finds it today denied any explanations but desperately needing them. I believe this to be the perfect description of what Becketts aims were for the audience being denied any explanation from Beckett himself and desperately wanting to know who or what Godot is. In stark contrast to Becketts surreal settings and arbitrary dialogue, Jean-Paul Sartre holds no blows when delivering his existentialist piece No Exit. The set itself is more representative of the hellish circumstances in which he has placed his characters as opposed to the stark emptiness of Becketts setting.The setting is just one room with no windows so characters and spectators alike have no sense of what time of day it is and a claustrophobic a wareness is supported get on by keeping the whole play within one act. In Waiting for Godot we observe all of the action in a sparse state of nature with just one solitary foliage-free tree as a visual representation of the outside world. The only hint of time passing is when the characters mention the previous days events or when the tree shows a mere sprouting of greenery in the second act of the piece.Along with the scenery the title of the play, No Exit, precedes dialogue and induces drama by giving a sense of inescapability and hopeless struggle to the play. Frederick Lumley describes the set beautifully in saying with its barren walls, its bricked up windows excluding daylight so that night and day are alike, the space where a mirror once hung (for in eternity one must look at others, not oneself anymore), is all part of a masochistic nightmare where continuity becomes an endless symphony of torture worse than any physical torture.With these points in mind it is evident that Sartre relied more on the situation in which his characters were based rather than the frivolities of Becketts characters and his absurdist approach. Although Beckett and Sartre shared the same philosophical outlooks on existentialism and the nature of human behaviour, Sartre used the theatre as his soap-box to create and present his philosophical views and tended to show the drama in the situation rather than the character based approach which Beckett utilized in most of his plays.Sartre himself states As a successor to the theatre of characters we want to have a theatre of situation. The people in our plays will be manifest from one another not as a coward is from a miser or a miser from a brave man, but rather as actions are divergent or clashing, as right may conflict with right. Sartre uses the situation in No Exit to create the dramatic conflict and tense atmosphere whereas Beckett uses the theatre of absurdity with sparse and stunning dialogue to create some form of dram atic tension in Waiting for Godot.Conclusively this makes Becketts play in truth much more ambiguous compared to the out and out existentialist views portrayed in No Exit. The characters in Sartres piece all seem beaten(prenominal) to an audience who after witnessing the play have no quandary in deciding where the play leads or where it leads from and the content from its start to its depraved and violent conclusion definitely advocates Sartres theory Hell is other people. Waiting for Godot, however, leaves the audience perplexed at the outcome and offers various questions as to the product line of its characters along with their motivations and mundane existence. With the erratic lines of action and the surreal and often pointless conversation, the audience can derive that the whole point of Waiting for Godot is there is no point. But is this correct? Only Samuel Beckett could have revealed that answer. Bibliography Beckett. S. Waiting For Godot. Chatham Faber Faber. 2006 ed. S artre. J.P No Exit and three other plays. Vintage International. 1996 ed. McDonald. R. The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett. Cambridge CUP. 2006. Levy. E. P. Beckett And The Voice Of The Species. capital of Ireland Macmillan. 1980 Knowlson. J McMillan (eds. ) The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, vol I Waiting for Godot. London Faber Faber, 1994. Unwin. S Woddis. C. A Pocket Guide To twentieth Century Drama. London Faber Faber. 2001. Lumley. F. New Trends In 20th Century Drama. London Barrie Jenkins Ltd. 1972 ed. References Styan. J.L Modern Drama in Theory and Practice2 (Symbolism, Surrealism and the Absurd) Cambridge CUP 1998 Lenny Love 2007 2 . Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 178. 3 . New Trends In 20th Century Drama, Ch10 p139 4 . Cambridge Intro to S. Beckett 5 . Cambridge Intro to S. Beckett Ch2, p22 6 . Cambridge Intro to S. Beckett ch2, p23 7 . Levy. E. P. Beckett the Voice of Species. p. 3. 8 . New Trends In 20th Century Drama. Ch10, p150 9 . New T rends in 20th Century Drama. Ch10, p141.