www.iaset.us editor@iaset.us TRAPPED IN TIME: IMMOBILITY AS TRAGEDY IN SAMUEL BECKETT’S WAITING FOR GODOT Athanasius Ako Ayuk Research Scholar, Department of English, Higher Teacher’s Training College, University of Yaounde 1, Cameroon ABSTRACT The burden of Beckett’s characters in Waiting for Godot lies in their inability to make progress and in the elevated state of despair that this engenders. They represent the fallen state of man and His struggle to uplift himself to a more respectable circumstance. This paper interrogates Beckett’s concept of time and how this constitutes the major source of his characters’ malaise and tragedy. The concept of time as linear progression is the lie in which Beckett’s characters is trapped. Rather than act as a vehicle of mobility, Time is the penultimate source of immobility. It is the tragic reflection of the fallen state of man, exalted paradoxically by debasement and disenfranchisement. Beckett turns Time, which is a measurement of human evolution into a symbol of hopelessness. Vladimir and Estragon are representations of defiled hope, who incarnate a besieged humanity caught in the throes of finitude, where expectation is aborted by an uncanny abstraction couched as Godot. This, Beckett seems to say is the source of our modern or rather postmodern anguish and anxiety, whose only resolution lies in human ability to be resilient and to choose. It is only in making a choice, that Vladimir and Estragon can mitigate their anguish and avert the tragedy of infinite wait. KEYWORDS: Waiting for Godot Article History Received: 23 Apr 2021 | Revised: 06 May 2021 | Accepted: 22 May 2021 INTRODUCTION Samuel Beckett, whose plays and prose exalt the fallen state of Man and portray His most existential angst, remains the most enigmatic playwright of the twentieth century. Waiting for Godot, probably his most important work, is the hallmark of that exaltation of human suffering. Beckett constructs his protagonists’ anxiety around their degraded nature and their desire to rise above the fray. A closer reading of the play reveals the complicity of time and fate in the sufferings of mankind, represented by the four characters-Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky. Mary M. F. Massoud has argued that Waiting for Godot (Henceforth WFG) is a play about “an exile from meaningful life” (42). The present paper looks at the characters in the play as victims of time and immobility, resulting in their permanent anguish and anxiety and thereby defining their existence as tragic. The question of the meaning of time has been an age long source of scientific and philosophical discussions 1 .Judeo-Christian philosophy constructs time as finite, 1 The Bible sets the tone for the vision of time as finite for humans even though infinite for God. Such books as Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (Bantam, 1988); Craig Bourne’s, A Future for Presentism, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, International Journal of Linguistics and Literature (IJLL) ISSN (P): 2319–3956; ISSN (E): 2319–3964 Vol. 10, Issue 1, Jan–Jun 2021; 57–68 © IASET