Blog 3 Topic 4

There are various forms of literature, like poem, novel, prose, etc. When writers are creating their works, It is critical to choose the appropriate form because it can help to express the author’s idea. For example, drama is very suited to “Waiting for Godot”. It is safe to say that if Beckett used another form to write “Waiting for Godot”, it would never become such a classic.

The trait of drama is that the entire article are composed of lines and a few amount of description of action. After all the drama is mainly created for actors to perform. In a theatre, the way audience watching the play is through actors’ body language and lines. There are no need to write about facial expression and characters’ inner world in a play because audience can not feel it.

This trait exactly fits into “Waiting for Godot”. The purpose of “Waiting for Godot” is to create a sense of absurdity and arouse audience’s thinking. Characters in this play all have a bunch of mystery, such as the relations between different characters, their social identities, their motivations, who is Godot, etc. Thus it is necessary to hide those basic information in order to magnify the sense of mystery. If “Waiting for Godot” was written in a normal novel, the author would not be able to avoid the appearance description and psychological description, which are unnecessary or even harmful to express the article’s main idea. If audience knew the detailed background information of Estragon and Vladimir, they would not feel the weirdness at the beginning of the play.

Psychological description is very important in building the characteristic of a character. The writer would usually give a detailed psychological description to show the character’s inner world and explain his behavior. This can give readers a chance to experience the character’s feeling and discover the character’s personality. However, those advantages of psychological descriptions would become a burden in “Waiting for Godot” because the author definitely did not want his readers to experience the main characters’ inner world, or understand their personalities. Instead Beckett intentionally drew readers’ attention to the conversation between the characters because those enormous and illogical dialogues can effectively create an absurd and somehow chaotic atmosphere.

I have been thinking about whether Beckett really had a setting for every character’s background information, like where they came from, what they did for living, etc. I think even Beckett really had planned those before, it would be unnecessary to show them in the play. Thus novels would be inappropriate for this story because it would be weird that there are no introduction or psychological description in a novel. But drama does not have this limitation; all the content of “Waiting for Godot” can be perfectly revealed in a drama.