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Pozzo and Lucky

Pozzo and Lucky have been together for sixty years. Pozzo controls Lucky by means of an extremely long rope, which he jerks and tugs if Lucky is the least bit slow.

It has been contended that " Pozzo and Lucky are simply Didi and Gogo writ large", unbalanced as their relationship is. However, Pozzo's dominance is superficial; "upon closer inspection, it becomes evident that Lucky always possessed more influence in the relationship, for he danced, and more importantly, thought – not as a service, but in order to fill a vacant need of Pozzo: he committed all of these acts for Pozzo. As such, since the first appearance of the duo, the true slave had always been Pozzo." Pozzo credits Lucky with having given him all the culture, refinement, and ability to reason that he possesses. His rhetoric has been learned by rote. Pozzo's "party piece" on the sky is a clear example: as his memory crumbles, he finds himself unable to continue under his own steam.

Little is learned about Pozzo besides the fact that he is on his way to the fair to sell his slave, Lucky. From Beckett's own life experiences in Ireland and wartime France, commentators such as Hugh Kenner have identified Pozzo as representing German behaviour in occupied France, or alternatively as a bullying and conceited Protestant Ascendancy landlord. When translating his original French dialogue into English, Beckett took pains to introduce Irish idiom (specifically, Dubliners' idiom): Pozzo's pipe is made by Kapp and Peterson, Dublin's best-known tobacconists (which he refers to as a " briar " but which Estragon calls by the dialect word dudeen). Not only is his Hiberno-English text more colourful than the French original, but it emphasizes the differences in the characters' social standing. Pozzo confesses to a poor memory but it is more a result of an abiding self-absorption. "Pozzo is a character who has to overcompensate. That's why he overdoes things... and his overcompensation has to do with a deep insecurity in him. These were things Beckett said, psychological terms he used." Beckett's advice to the American director Alan Schneider was: " is a hypomaniac and the only way to play him is to play him mad."

"In his translation... Beckett struggled to retain the French atmosphere as much as possible, so that he delegated all the English names and places to Lucky, whose own name, he thought, suggested such a correlation".

Lucky appears to be the subservient member of their relationship, at least initially, carrying out every task that Pozzo bids him to do without question, portraying a form of "dog-like devotion" to his master. He struggles with a heavy suitcase, falling on a number of occasions, only to be helped and held up by Estragon and Vladimir.

Lucky speaks only once in the play and it is in response to Pozzo's order to "think" for Estragon and Vladimir. The ostensibly abstract philosophical meanderings supplied to the audience by Lucky during his speech have been described as "a flood of completely meaningless gibberish" by Martin Esslin in his essay, "The Theatre of the Absurd". Esslin suggests that this seemingly involuntary, philosophical spouting is an example of the actor's working "against the dialogue rather than with it", providing grounds for Esslin's claims that the "fervor of delivery" in the play must "stand in a dialectical contrast to the pointlessness of the meaning of the lines".

Jean Martin, who originated the role of Lucky in Paris in 1953, spoke to a doctor named Marthe Gautier, who was working at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. Martin asked if she knew of a physiological reason that would explain Lucky's voice as it was written in the text. Gautier suggested Parkinson's disease, which, she said, "begins with a trembling, which gets more and more noticeable, until later the patient can no longer speak without the voice shaking". Martin began incorporating this idea into his rehearsals. Beckett and the director may not have been completely convinced, but they expressed no objections. When Martin mentioned to the playwright that he was "playing Lucky as if he were suffering from Parkinson's", Beckett responded by saying "Yes, of course", and mentioning that his own mother had Parkinson's.

When Beckett was asked why Lucky was so named, he replied, "I suppose he is lucky to have no more expectations..."