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Nothing can be taken at face value in Waiting for Godot, nothing is what it seems, and nothing is as anticipated. And this disparity is, as we shall see, the whole point: “the ablation,” as Beckett (1931) says in his important essay on Proust, “of desire” (p. 7), the breaking of the crust of habit. Thus the artistic problem he faced was paradoxical: how to shatter expectations without at the same time shattering the play, and how to suggest an alternative to habit without simply bringing in another set of expectations.
His solution was to construct a dialectic out of this paradox. First, he sets up what looks like a conventional plot-with-a-purpose, which suggests that somehow the world makes sense. As far as its two main characters are concerned, then, they are waiting for Godot, and if he does not come tonight, perhaps he will come tomorrow night. That is the ostensible premise of the plot, a premise like any other. Then Beckett makes it clear that nothing is going to happen, least of all anything that is expected, which suggests that the world does not make sense. If we are waiting to find out who Godot is and why they are waiting for him, we will wait forever, for they do not know and never find out. Nor does the play itself ever give or imply the answers.
“Beckett was quite right to reply,” Ludovic Janvier (1966) tells us, “when asked what Godot meant: ‘If I had known, 1 would have said so in the play’” (p. 166). There is thus a second and much less obvious premise which undermines and supercedes the first: Now that you have been caught waiting for Godot, much as my characters have been caught, can you not see that this is the wrong approach to grasping my point? The play, in other words, misleads us