new hibernia review / iris éireannach nua, 17:4 (geimhreadh / winter, 2013), 109–128 Robert A. Volpicelli  Bare Ontology: Synge, Beckett, and the Phenomenology of Imperialism The most effective entrée into the dramatic worlds of either Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907) or Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) may just come from a few pairs of humble, well-worn boots. Indeed, at times both Synge and Beckett seem preoccupied less with the ideas in their characters’ heads than with the boots coming on and off their feet. At the beginning of Playboy’s second act, a group of “Stranger girls” bursts in on Synge’s tramp-turned-hero, Christy Mahon, as he polishes the boots of Pegeen Mike, his barmaid love interest. 1 Forced to make a hasty exit, Christy leaves behind his own boots, which one of the girls tries on and, after closely examining their muddied exteriors, concludes, “That man’s been walking, I’m telling you” (PWW 116). Of course, the tramps in Godot wait more than they walk; yet boots re- main of the utmost importance for Beckett’s Estragon, whom the play’s opening scene shows attempting to muster a “supreme effort” in order to free his swollen, booted foot. 2 In a play structured around so many repetitions, it is not surprising that this performance starts over at the end of Act One, when Estragon decides to ditch his boots (which he may or may not find again, later in the second act) so that he can walk barefoot, as “Christ did” (WG 50). Synge and Beckett’s overly dramatic treatments of boots play into the co- medic undoing of their characters—after finding his muddy prints, the pack of Mayo girls eventually track down the cowardly Christy; Estragon is never more clownish than during his epic battles with his boots. But the boots in these plays do more than act as comedic props. They also point to a deeper, phenomenolog- ical drama concerned with the way objects mediate our experience of being-in- the-world. As things that connect us to the ground, facilitating our movements through the world we live in, a modest pair of boots owns something of a sur- prising philosophical aura, one that Martin Heidegger notices in his well-known 1. John Millington Synge, The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (1907; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 115; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (PWW 115). 2. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1953; London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 7; hereafter cited parenthetically, thus: (WG 7).