Time and Narrative in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame

Abstract

The account of narrative temporality has a propensity to give impetus towards an absurd c o m p l e x i t y. C o s m o l o g i c a l a n d phenomenological collision of time gives rise to this absurdity. Philosophical tradition views the cosmological time as a succession of ‘ n o w s . ’ O n t h e o t h e r h a n d , phenomenological time is seen as an embedded structure. The concept of time as succession is rendered inoperable by the knowledge of time as co-existence. This paper intends to examine time and narration in Samuel Beckett’s plays Waiting for Godot and Endgame which always play a vital role in the turns and twists of the plot structure, characterization, environment, stage, and, above all, on the audience. The treatment and treatise of time from an ontological and epistemological viewpoint, which is seen through the scope of Narrative Theory, will certainly add more insight to the subject, and hence will explore beyond the mere philosophical/metaphysical boundaries of ‘time’ to the more practical aspects of it in Beckett’s plays.