Situating Godot in an Ecocritical Garden

Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ has been, for long, read as a  prominent example of an absurdist play, dealing with the questions of an existential crisis. But with Beckett, it's best not to get tied down to one particular meaning.Recent scholarship has engaged some other plays of Beckett in the context of Ecocritiscm  Eco-criticism as a mode of studying literature enables the conceptualisation  of nature and natural world as imagined through literary texts. 

Most critics have failed to read "Waiting for Godot" as a text that articulates deep concerns regarding an impending environmental crisis. Though ‘environment’ or ‘nature’ as a theme is not employed vividly in the play, Beckett’s setting of the play as dead and apocalypse-like landscapes have much to say about the growing anxieties of an environmental catastrophe. Torn and tarnished by wartime destruction, nature has lost its conventional power to console the threats caused by the war, and the ruination the living world has witnessed serves as a sharp contrast to the time when the characters talk of happy times of the past. 

Their reminiscence of the happy times, the symbol of the tree, the loneliness of the characters and most importantly their waiting for Godot is symbolic of the ‘hope’ for regeneration. The tree which is used in the second act with few leaves helps in structuring this hope as well. Thus with the attempt to highlight and explore the human-nature relationships, the paper discusses 'Waiting for Godot’ from an eco-critical angle. The paper shall also try to situate the play in the context of ecophobia and powerlessness of individual action in an actual historical situation.