by Bret Stalcup

Created on: June 09, 2008

Though alienation can be transcended to positive benefit, none of this can be seen in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot; instead, we find ourselves confronting perhaps the starkest portrayal of alienation, futility, and ennui in modernist literature. This alienation exists not primarily in relation to environmental factors but rather as an internal processthe central figures of the play (all of the figures, actually) seem completely incapable of engaging productive action beyond the most limited scopeeating a turnip or putting on a pair of boots is the limit of their effectiveness. In a very actual sense they are alienated from their own lives, from their possibility of action; in fact, it is impossible to ascertain the conditions that caused this alienation, and in judging events by the play's own terms it is entirely possible that the characters have never existed elsewhere, and never will.

This sense of characters existing as self-alienated can pose a problem for what may be seen as a traditional vantage for modernism, namely the individual being alienated from a rapidly changing and uncaring society. If modernist alienation arises from a bed of social forces that produce a sterile, mechanized, stay-on-the-sidewalk-type society of consumption and empty values, then how can Beckett's alienation be viewed as modernist, since the characters exist in a limbo devoid of such impactive events and controls? The set of the playbasically a road and a treecan be seen as an island that exists apart from modernist influences; there is no regulation, commodification, exploitation, or mechanization going on, no changes in national values or culture, no shift in status (except perhaps for that of beating a blind man, and as this results in only a temporary fluctuation in power dynamics with no lasting effects such can't really be said to create a hierarchal shift). Here we have a world where nothing changes, and thus a world that can plausibly be said to be anti-modernist. What is Beckett doing here?

On one level, the answer is simple: Beckett is using an extreme situation as a form of thought-experiment in order to demonstrate that alienation results not from contact with a certain range of cultural and historic forces, but rather from the mind of the individual. Modernism is a convenient term for sets of complex, affiliated events that are attached to a time and location, but as with all such terms we need to be careful not to reify them; to say something like "Subject

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