WORLD WAR II AND CAPITALISM’S EFFECTS ON MODERN INDIVIDUAL IN SAMUEL BECKETT’ S WAITING FOR GODOT
SAMUEL BECKETT’ İN ‘GODOT’ U BEKLERKEN’ ADLI ESERİNDE İKINCİ DÜNYA SAVAŞI VE KAPİTALİZMİN MODERN BİREY ÜZERİNDEKİ ETKİLERİ

Author : Fikret GÜVEN
Number of pages : 137-149

Abstract

Waiting for Godot is a play by Samuel Beckett, where two character wait for the arrival of someone called Godot. Godot never arrives and while waiting they engage in a variety of discussions and encounter two other characters. In this play, Samuel Beckett portrayed the meaningless and psychologically traumatized condition of the individual in the new world order created by the Second World War and capitalism. His influential play focuses on the interaction between newly emerged economic order and distorted psychology of people. As a consequence of the trauma caused by the war and capitalism, through his characters, Beckett represents the types of individuals who have lost their perception of time and the meaning of their existence. The present study analyzes interaction between the capitalist economic structure and the forming of the individual psychologies. The two create each other and exacerbate the already existing ill effects on the individual in a vicious circle. Beckett foresees the socio-economic and psychological impacts of the Second World War and the new capitalism that have made the individuals captured in a meaningless lacunae and as an absurdist playwright, Beckett depicts the post-war man and his economic, social, and psychological collapse. Through Waiting for Godot, the deformation and the transformation of the modern individual is exposed. Disagreeing with Hegelian and Marxist perspectives concerning the progression of history for better, but agreeing with the impact of capitalism on individual lives, Beckett’s world offers little hope. Putting the blame on the after-effects of the Second World War and the emergence of the new capitalist order, what Beckett depicts in the play is a world that has lost both the present and the future.

Keywords

Waiting for Godot, The Theater of the Absurd, Capitalism, trauma, Second World II

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