Waiting for Godot
Christian

Much of the play is steeped in scriptural allusion. The boy from Act I mentions that he and his brother mind Godot's sheep and goats. Much can be read into Beckett's inclusion of the story of the two thieves from Luke 23:39–43 and the ensuing discussion of repentance. It is easy to see the solitary tree as representative of the Christian cross or the tree of life. Some see God and Godot as one and the same. Vladimir's "Christ have mercy upon us!" could be taken as evidence that that is at least what he believes.

Another, perhaps less conspicuous, potentially religious, element in the play, is Pozzo's bout with blindness, during which he comes to resemble the biblical figure of Bartimaeus or 'The Blind Beggar'.

This reading is given further weight early in the first act when Estragon asks Vladimir what it is that he has requested from Godot:

Other explicit Christian elements that are mentioned in the play include, but are not limited to, repentance, the Gospels, a Saviour, human beings made in God's image, the cross, and Cain and Abel.

According to biographer Anthony Cronin, " always possessed a Bible, at the end more than one edition, and Bible concordances were always among the reference books on his shelves." Beckett himself was quite open on the issue: "Christianity is a mythology with which I am perfectly familiar so I naturally use it." As Cronin argues, these biblical references "may be ironic or even sarcastic ".

"In answer to a defence counsel question in 1937 (during the libel action brought by his uncle against Oliver St. John Gogarty) as to whether he was a Christian, Jew or atheist, Beckett replied, 'None of the three ' ". Looking at Beckett's entire œuvre, Mary Bryden observed that "the hypothesised God who emerges from Beckett's texts is one who is both cursed for his perverse absence and cursed for his surveillant presence. He is by turns dismissed, satirised, or ignored, but he, and his tortured son, are never definitively discarded."
detectable_format:json_format