Explore the presentation of uncertainty in 'Waiting for Godot'

Waiting for Godot, famously a play where “nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful” is a play riddled with uncertainty as, for some reason we are not told, the two main characters wait persistently in the middle of nowhere for something or someone called Godot, that/who never appears. Uncertainty is so constant in this play that it might be hard to know where to start in answering the question above. I would recommend trying to find patterns - recurring themes of uncertainty. For example, uncertainty of time and space are two areas of doubt immediately evident to the reader or audience member, given Beckett’s use of a sparse, impersonal set, and two main characters who are aging, and suffering, we can assume, from amnesia. The normal doubts that we associate with memory loss, such as forgetting what day of the week it is, are no longer trivial in a context there is no presence of external objective reality. Uncertainties of time and space extend even to identity and personality, as we see an inversion of each character’s personality traits in the second half. Beckett even forces the audience to start questioning their own memory of events when even objective truths, such as the colour of a pair of shoes, are thrown into doubt. A good answer to this question would explore these themes of indeterminacy and their effect on the audience. However, to take this response further, we can put the effect of these uncertainties on the audience in the context of what we know about the development of the Theatre of the Absurd. What is the purpose of all this uncertainty? It’s effect on the audience is frustration and confusion, as Beckett breaks all norms of conventional theatre which audiences have come to expect – such as a play that has a plot, and a beginning, middle and end. In the English premier of the play in 1955, much of the audience walked out and the actors were heckled throughout. Brecht calls this the alienation effect. However, Beckett never entirely alienates his audience. He is consistent in his ambiguity, even uncertainty is ambiguous, since he keeps his increasingly incredulous audience engaged with promises of resolution, such as details of Godot’s “white” beard. In doing so Beckett reveals to us the absurdity of our hunger for certainty, reason and order, in a world which, like his play, is entirely devoid of it.