Samuel Beckett

In Kyle’s wiki, Beckett appears through his 1955 play Waiting for Godot, cited in Faith is Not Blind (Bruce and Marie Hafen) as an emblem of the twentieth century’s “shattered age.” The Hafens note that in the play two men carry on what usually sounds like meaningless conversation while waiting for someone named Godot who never comes — and that “because Beckett believed that life has only the meaning the individual gives it, waiting for what or who never comes was for him a fair representation of mortality.” A 1990 British Royal National Theatre poll named Godot the most significant English-language play of the twentieth century, partly, the Hafens argue, because it “hauntingly reveals the darkest shadows of our frightening age.”

In the Hafens’ “life / my life” framing, Beckett’s Godot sits alongside Viktor Frankl’s concentration camps and the rise of relativism as a marker of the collapse of shared meaning — the dissolution of the medieval and Enlightenment “outer box” that the Restoration, in their telling, rebuilds. Left without that frame, only personal preference and “cosmic loneliness” remain.

Context: Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist and playwright, a central figure of the Theatre of the Absurd, best known for Waiting for Godot; he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969.

Where this appears

• Faith is Not Blind — Beckett and Waiting for Godot cited as a portrait of the twentieth century’s collapse of shared meaning, paired with Frankl as the dissolution of the “outer box.”
• Waiting for Godot — concept page for his play, the vehicle by which Beckett enters the corpus.