不在场的他者从存在主义角度分析《等待戈多》.doc

学科分类号（二级）7405011

本科学生毕业论文（设计）

题　　目 Waiting for the Absent Other: An Existentialistic Analysis of Waiting for Godot 不在场的他者——从存在主义角度分析 《等待戈多》
姓　　名　李秀才　　　　　　　 　　
学　　号　094050113　　　　　　　　　
院、　系　外国语学院 英语系
专　　业　英语（师范 4）　　　　
指导教师　谢楠　　　　　　
职称（学历）　助教（硕士）　　　　　　　 　

2013年04月30日

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Except where reference is made in the text of the thesis, this thesis contains no material published elsewhere or extracted in whole or part from a thesis presented by me for another degree or diploma.

No other person’s work has been used without due acknowledge ment in the main text of the thesis.

This thesis has not been submitted for the award of any other degree or diploma in my tertiary institution.

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Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to my supervisor Xie Nan for her patient guidance, general assistance, helpful advice and continual encouragement, all of which have been of inestimable work to the completion of my paper. Without her helpful instruction, detailed comments, and beneficial advice, this paper would have never been finished so smoothly.

My thanks also go to all the teachers who have taught me and helped me a lot during the four years of my study in Yunnan Normal University. Without their teaching, I could not have learned so much.

At last, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my family, who gave me great help and encouragement during my four years’ study and the thesis writing.

Abstract

Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece Waiting for Godot is one of famous absurd plays in the world. It is labeled as “Anti-Theater”, “New Theater”, and “Theater of the Absurd”. As we can see, Waiting for Godot is a work in the name of “Theater of the Absurd” coined by Martin Esslin. Waiting for Godot which is regarded as the classic of the Theatre of the Absurd is Beckett’s turning point from novel writing to drama, and also a representative work of the 20th century drama from modernity to postmodernity. Based on the complicated social background and spiritual crisis in the western world, this work tries to reveal the absurd living condition, loneliness and hopelessness, desolation and meaninglessness of western people.
Waiting for Godot aroused thousands of people’s resonance after this work’s first show in Paris. This work also attracts much attention of critics in the literary world. Lots of new interpretations continuously emerge with varied views in the literary world. Some critics argue that this work does not display the existentialism, and some hold it is closely related to existentialism. So this paper attempts to use the literary and criticism of existentialism to analyze the relationship between existentialism and Waiting for Godot and to discuss the meanings of waiting in Waiting for Godot and the absurdity of the play.

Key words: Waiting for Godot; The absent other; Existentialism; Absurdity

摘 要

萨缪尔贝克特的巨作《等待戈多》是世界著名的荒诞派戏剧。它总是被冠名为“反戏剧”，“新戏剧”以及“荒诞派戏剧”。 正如我们所知，《等待戈多》是马丁艾斯林荒诞派戏剧名义下的作品。荒诞派戏剧经典之作的《等待戈多》被认为是贝克特从小说写作到戏剧创作的转折点，也被认为是20世纪现代主义向后现代主义过渡的代表作。在西方世界精神危机和复杂的社会环境大背景下，这部作品旨在揭露西方人民荒诞的生活状况，孤独感，绝望感，分离感以及无意义的生活。
《等待戈多》在巴黎上演处女秀过后，引起了成千上万人的共鸣。这部作品同时吸引了文学界大量学者的眼球。文学界从不同角度分析的著作源源不断，潺潺不息。许多评论员认为这部作品并没有呈现存在主义，但也有人认为它和存在主义有密不可分的关系。因此本论文将从存在主义的角度来分析《等待戈多》同存在主义的关系，讨论《等待戈多》找中等待的意蕴以及这部戏剧的荒诞性。

关键词: 《等待戈多》；不在场的他者；存在主义；荒诞

Contents
1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………1
1.1Samuel Beckett and Waiting for Godot…………………...........1
1.2Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism……………………………………...3
1.3The Outline of the Thesis
2. Literature review……………………………………………………………………3
2.1The Studies Aboard and at Home …………………………………..…4
2.2The Uniqueness of the Study…………………………….............................5
3. Theoretical Framework……………………………………………………….…….6
3.1 The Theatre of the Absurd…………………………………….........6
3.2 Jean-Paul Stare’s Existentialism………………………………….........7
4. Waiting for the Absent Other: An Existentialistic Analysis of Waiting for Godot....................................................…....8
4.1The Absurdity of Waiting for Godot………………...8
4.1.1 Plot……………………………………………..8
4.1.2Characters
4.1.2The Illogical and Meaningless Dialogue……………………………………..9
4.1.3Circulation.................................................................................11
4.1.4No Certain Space-time Environment and Complete Structure.
4.2 Waiting for the Absent Other……………...12
4.2.1The Absent Other Is Nothingness…………………………………13
4.2.2 The Absent Other Is Savior……………………………………………..14
4.2.3The Absent Other Is Belief
4.3 An Existentialistic Analysis of Waiting for Godot……………….15
4.3.1Death…………………………………………..16
4.3.2 The Meaning of Human Existence………………………...17
4.3.3The Place of God
5. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...18
References……………………………………………………………………………19

1. Introduction
1.1 Samuel Becket and Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) whose work offers a black, tragicomic outlook on human nature was an Irish novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. Beckett is widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, his work often coupled with black comedy and gallows humor. He is considered one of the last modernists because of the influence from James Joyce. As an inspiration to many later writers, he is also sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd. Especially his representative work Waiting for Godot becomes the classic in the genre of Theatre of the Absurd. Beckett was warded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his writing, which—— in new forms for the novel and drama,——in the destitution of modem man acquire its elevation” (The Nobel Prize in Literature 1969)
Waiting for Godot was written in 1952, it was first published by French, and its first show was in Paris in 1953. The World War II had big influences to the play and Samuel Beckett. People around the world suffered too much from the World War II, too many people were still despair, helpless, panic, misgiving. Samuel Beckett witnessed the cruelness and inhumanity of the World War II and the spirit crisis of western people. Waiting for Godot has become a modern classic because it gives us a human situation expressed with an emotional force. The play has a far-reaching influence. As we have seen, Beckett’s dramatic and verbal art embodies vivid images of action and a profound vision of human existence.Wherever we read Waiting for Godot, we can see images of spiritual loss, and of human sufferings. A profound sense of loss does pervade all this play. The play speaks to us of the real world, of human condition.
1.2 Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism
Here Existentialism will be a great help to analyze my thesis.There has never been general agreement on the definition of Existentialism. It is generally believed that the first prominent existentialist philosopher to adopt the term was Jean-Paul Sartre who did most to bring existentialism into the arts and into search of for an authentic way of life on the part of many disaffected youth of Europe and America.
1.3 The Outline of the Thesis
While doing my argument, the first thing I’m going to do is to introduce studies on Waiting for Godot from abroad and China. In this part, we can have a general knowledge of judgments on Waiting for Godot and understand the significance of Waiting for Godot in literature field and other fields. Then following part is to present theoretical framework which will help me to analyze my argument. This thesis will touch Existentialism and The Theatre of the Absurd. Through part of Sartre’s Existentialism and Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd, this thesis will concentrate on the following topic:The absurdity of Waiting for Godot; The meaning of the Absent Other; The reflection of Existentialism in Waiting for Godot. Then finally this thesis will give a conclusion.

2. Literature Review
The critical response to the works of Samuel Beckett has been overwhelming, especially after the successful first show of Waiting for Godot in Paris in 1953. And the play made Beckett a household word. And then numerous books and thousands of articles have been published on Beckett, primarily in Europe, the United States, and Canada. Since he wrote most of his works in French, and then translated them himself into English. And the diversity of the interpretations to Beckett’s woks has been varied: political, psychological, philosophical, historical, thematic, postmodernism, Christian, autobiographical, homoerotic, and so on.
2.1 Studies Abroad and at Home
The first period is from 1960s to 1970s. During this period, studies mainly focus on form and content, the influence of literary, philosophical and historical ideas. And Martin Esslin wrote The Theatre of the Absurd, it was the most frequently cited resources for the research of Waiting for Godot and other famous absurd plays. Esslin really thought highly of Waiting for Godot and gave special appraisements on it. In the Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel Beckett, David Hesla examines Samuel Beckett’s novels and plays from the perception of the historical ideas. He shows how Samuel Beckett was influenced by the theories of the pre-Socratics, the rationalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Hegel, Kierkegard, Sartre, and Husserl. Any drama can’t live without the stage, so Ruby Cohn’s Samuel Beckett: the Comic Gamut concerned Waiting for Godot’s stage performance. He used Bergson’s catalog of comic techniques as a starting point for her study of the comic elements in Becket’s prose and drama.
The second period is in the early 1980s. Lots of critics made an in-depth analysis of art and identity. Some of them evaluate the theme of self-consciousness in Beckett’s works, for instance, Hannah Case Copeland illustrated this in his book: Art and Artist in the work of Samuel Beckett. Some connected Samuel Beckett’s works with Existentialism. Lance St. John Butler in Samuel and the Meaning of Being: A Study in Ontological Parable aims to try to lighten the Beckettian gloom with those philosophical lamps that seem to work the best: Heidegger, Sartre, and Hegel. In Waiting for Godot and Philosophy, Lance St. John Butler argues that Waiting for Godot is not a philosophical play by saying that Waiting for Godot is the parable of human waiting.
The third period is contemporary times. The studies have changed so much from 1950s to recent years abroad. Till now, Beckett’s work, were termed the banner of post-structuralism postmodernism, reader-response and feminism. Especially from 1980s to 2001 lots of essays appeared, many of them from American, which use new-found liberty of interpretation. For instance, James Calderwood’s essay “Ways of Waiting in Waiting for Godot” first appeared in the influential journal Modern Drama, it demonstrates that deconstructive criticism entails not the aggressive and once-for-all liquidation of the coherence possessed by a given text, however, an attentive discussion of ways in which a text can simultaneously establish and undermine its own truth. Among them, there are few conspicuous works from the feminism aspect. Several pieces of feminist approach to Waiting for Godot could be found in Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives which was edited by Linda Ben-Zui.
The studies of Waiting for Godot and Samuel Beckett’s work have a very short history in China. Theatre of the absurd as well as Waiting for Godot was introduced to China by translators and critics. Waiting for Godot was first translated by Shi Xianrong in 1965. But it was simply used as an example to criticize decayed life value of western capitalism at that time because of the influence from Cultural Revolution in China. So it’s really hard to spread the theatre of the absurd and Waiting for Godot in china widely at that time. Zhu Hong who wrote the Preface of this book said that Waiting for Godot tries to express the life condition of human being, the crisis of spirit and the decadency of the bourgeoisie.
In 1980, Shi Xianrong translated The Anthology of the Theatre of Absurd This book gives us an overall introduction to the works of absurdist. Zhang Hongsheng assumed that Waiting for Godot was an interpretation of existentialism in his paper On the Theatre of the Absurd. But Cheng Ge was strongly against that Waiting for Godot can not be interpreted as the illustration of existentialism simply and hastily, moreover, there are great disparities between absurd and existential drama.
From mid 1980s, the scholars of china began to draw attention to the theatre of the absurd .And they started to criticize Waiting for Godot objectively, however, most of the studies are just translation and the achievements of the foreign studies, only a few of them are original and initiative. Anyway some creative papers and books have worked out. Among these works, most of them are derived from some journals and books, such as Foreign Literature, Foreign Literature Review, Foreign Literature Study and other papers. And during this period, the collections of the Theatre of the Absurd were first published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House.
Some thematic and linguistic interpretations had been flourishing from 1994 to 2004. And there are lots of remarkable papers and books on Waiting for Godot. Such as On the Art of Beckett’s Absurd Theatre by Cao Bo: Waiting for Godot: the Disillusion and Reestablishment of Belief by Xiao Sixin; The Linguistic Features in Waiting for Godot by Shu Xiaomei; On Waiting in Waiting for Godot by Wang Shanshan and so on.
The development of Chinese drama was obviously influenced by the theatre of absurd and Waiting for Godot deeply and profoundly. Play writers such as Gao Xingjian who has great accomplishment on literature and he also is a tremendous master of a foreign language became interesting in the theatre of absurd and absorb from this kind of drama. They introduced the theatre of absurd by translation, performance and etc. But the theatre of the absurd was not easily spread in China. So we are not surprise that the performance of Waiting for Godot presented by Gao Xingjian in 1970s couldn’t catch people’s eyes.