Waiting for Godot

Samuel Beckett’s celebrated 1955 play, cited in Faith is Not Blind (Bruce and Marie Hafen) as an emblem of the twentieth century’s “shattered age.” In the play two men carry on what usually sounds like meaningless conversation while they keep waiting for someone named Godot, who never comes. Because Beckett believed 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 it the most significant English-language play of the twentieth century — partly, the Hafens note, because it “hauntingly reveals the darkest shadows of our frightening age,” with critics invoking the concentration camps in describing its picture of “man, naked, helpless, waiting… intensely alone.”

In the Hafens’ “life / my life” framing, Godot sits alongside Viktor Frankl’s camps as a marker of the collapse of the medieval and Enlightenment “outer box” of shared meaning — when the macro frame dissolves, only personal preference and “cosmic loneliness” remain. The Restoration, they argue, rebuilds that big box rather than leaving meaning to the individual.

Context: Waiting for Godot (En attendant Godot) is an absurdist tragicomedy by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, first staged in 1953, widely read as a meditation on meaninglessness, waiting, and the human condition in a post-war world.

Where this appears

• Faith is Not Blind — cited as a portrait of the twentieth century’s collapse of shared meaning, paired with Frankl as the dissolution of the “outer box” the Restoration rebuilds.