Waiting for Godot: “Mr. Godot will definitely come tomorrow.”

Click here to read the book

Waiting for Godot is a play by Samuel Beckett, the Irish writer and Nobel Prize laureate. The whole thing is stripped down to the bare minimum: one setting, two main characters, and three supporting ones. The plot is just as spare—so much so that, from a conventional point of view, you could almost say there isn’t a plot at all. Two men wait under a tree for someone named Godot. While they wait, they talk about everything and nothing. In the end, Godot never shows up. Since the play is basically anti-plot, I’ve tried to step away from the usual angles—story structure, character arcs, and so on—and look for another way into it.

Beckett was born in Dublin and later settled in France. While living there, he met another towering Irish writer who was based in Paris: James Joyce. (A quick aside: it’s often said Beckett’s work was deeply influenced by Joyce’s, and I’ve also heard a few personal anecdotes about the two of them—if you’re curious, it’s worth digging into on your own.) During the war, after Germany occupied France, Beckett took part in the Resistance. And this play, written not long after World War II, clearly carries the shadow of that era—the broader atmosphere of a world still trying to make sense of trauma. What it’s reaching for is still worth talking about today, decades later.

So who is Godot? And why are Estragon and Vladimir waiting for him? By the time you get to the end of the script, you still don’t have clear answers. All we can say for sure—at the literal level—is that they don’t meet Godot, and they keep on waiting. There’s a well-known story that someone once asked Beckett what Godot “really” stood for, and Beckett replied something like: “If I knew who Godot was, I would have put it in the play.” Whether he meant that entirely or not, you can see the point: Beckett deliberately keeps Godot out of reach. That mystery doesn’t stop at the edge of the stage—it spills out into the world outside the play, and it’s still with us.

Some people argue that because “Godot” sounds a bit like “God,” he represents a kind of savior, and the fact that the two men never receive him reflects the collapse of faith after the war—a longing for redemption that goes unanswered, leaving people stranded in confusion. Others say Godot stands for “meaning” itself: Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for life to become meaningful, and until that meaning arrives, they fill the time with trivial routines—taking off a boot, eating a carrot—little acts that don’t lead anywhere, distractions for a life that feels directionless. Variations of these interpretations go on and on.

But to me, whether you call it “God,” “meaning,” or Beckett’s own “I don’t know,” it can all be gathered into one word: hope. What Estragon and Vladimir are waiting for—what humanity, wounded and disoriented, is waiting for—is hope.

Later in the play, when Pozzo begs them for help, Vladimir says that Pozzo is really calling out to all of humanity—only, at that moment, all of humanity happens to be just the two of them. He says something along the lines of: if cruel fate has swept us into this mess, into the company of the shameless and the fallen, then let’s at least do one thing properly—let’s represent them, just this once. That moment makes Beckett’s intention feel clear: Estragon and Vladimir aren’t just two individuals. They’re standing in for everyone. And the “Godot” they wait for is the same “Godot” the rest of us wait for, too.

So, will Godot ever actually arrive?

I think a lot of people finish the play, see that the two men decide to keep waiting, and immediately conclude: He’s never coming. But I don’t think that’s the answer. My answer is the same line the play repeats again and again—“I don’t know.”

Because it’s only when you don’t know whether Godot will come that endless waiting becomes possible. (Quick digression: writing this, I’m reminded of the famous closing thought in The Great Gatsby—that sense of living on a promise just out of reach, forever reaching forward. Godot works like that, too.) If Estragon and Vladimir truly knew Godot wasn’t coming, they’d either leave—or commit to ending things decisively. The only reason they stay is that a sliver of hope is still alive, however irrational it may be.

Beckett, in fact, plants that kind of hope in the play through small details—but it’s the sort of hope that falls apart the moment you press on it. The two most obvious examples are the barren tree that sprouts leaves and the boy messenger.

On the first day, the men wait where they agreed to meet—beneath a completely leafless tree. Godot doesn’t show. But when they return the next day, that same tree has suddenly grown new leaves. The change lifts their spirits. In ordinary symbolism, fresh leaves suggest rebirth, renewal, the idea that something can begin again. So the tree turning green feels like a sign—a good omen that today might be the day Godot finally comes.

And yet it’s hard to take at face value. Overnight, from bare branches to green leaves? That’s too fast. A tree doesn’t transform like that in a single night; it would take days. But the dialogue keeps using words like “yesterday,” insisting on a simple, continuous timeline—while the tree seems to break that continuity. The contradiction doesn’t strengthen the sense of progress. It does the opposite: it unsettles time itself.

That same blurred handling of time shows up again later. In Act Two, as the light fades, the characters argue about whether the sun is rising or setting. They genuinely can’t tell whether they’re looking at dawn or dusk. You can read that as more than confusion: the end of one day is the start of another, and maybe they’ve been trapped in this loop—waiting for Godot—for far longer than they can grasp. When time becomes vague, memory becomes vague with it. Nobody can be sure whether “yesterday” was really yesterday.

Then there’s the boy messenger. Twice, he appears with a message, and both times he says plainly: “Mr. Godot will come tomorrow.” The first time, that promise lands with full force. But after the second day arrives and Godot still doesn’t, the promise starts to lose its power—hope thins out.

And the boy himself is full of uncertainty. He says he has a brother. If it’s the same boy returning, why does he speak as if he’s meeting Estragon and Vladimir for the first time? But if it’s not the same boy—if it’s the brother—then the two are described as identical. Either way, the messenger feels unreliable. And he’s a child, which adds another layer of instability: we don’t usually entrust important, delicate matters to a child. Yet Godot sends a boy both times. That choice quietly undermines the credibility of the message—and makes “tomorrow” feel less like a date and more like a mechanism.

So the two men remain suspended beneath a hope that can’t withstand scrutiny, caught in a cycle where “tomorrow” always exists, and arrival never quite happens.

Now let’s talk about Pozzo and Lucky—the master-and-servant pair who take up just as much dramatic space as anyone else. When they reappear the second time, the change is shocking: one has become blind, the other mute. And yet the one thing that doesn’t change is their power structure—Pozzo remains the master, Lucky remains the slave.

Lucky’s “thinking” scene, once he’s forced to put on the hat, is undeniably one of the play’s high points. The moment the hat goes on, he launches into what sounds like a torrent of gibberish—words tumbling out one after another, stuffed with academic terminology mixed in with everyday vocabulary, but never quite forming real sentences. In that moment, Lucky doesn’t feel like someone expressing himself so much as a machine carrying out a command: the master says that if he puts on the hat, he will think—so he “thinks.” It’s less a speech than an automatic response.

By the time they meet again, the cruelty of that arrangement has intensified. Lucky is now mute—unable to speak, let alone protest. Pozzo is blind—unable to navigate life on his own, which only gives him more reason (and more need) to bark orders at the person beneath him. Some critics argue that the fact both men end up disabled is a metaphor: under crushing oppression, everyone is damaged, not just the victim. With the postwar backdrop in mind, that reading feels persuasive to me.

One striking thing about Beckett’s character design is how often people come in pairs—as contrasts, mirrors, counterweights. The two protagonists form one such pair: one more rational, the other more emotional; one inclined to reflect, the other quick to impatience—two recognizable human temperaments. Pozzo and Lucky form another pair: master and slave, the two extremes on a single scale of power. Even the boy messenger has a counterpart—his brother (or possibly the same boy, depending on how you read it). One tends goats, the other tends sheep; and in some Western traditions, sheep are associated with gentleness and innocence, while goats can suggest stubbornness, mischief, even something more sinister. Again, a deliberate opposition.

The effect is bleakly democratic. No matter what “type” of person you are, you don’t seem any more likely to reach Godot. And the messenger who brings word of Godot might be an angel—or might be something closer to a devil. The message doesn’t guarantee salvation. Maybe that, too, is part of why Beckett builds these contrasts: to remind us that hope arrives dressed in uncertainty, and even the signs we cling to can point in opposite directions.

I’ll end with a well-known anecdote. It’s said that at one of the early performances of Waiting for Godot, a large part of the audience walked out before it even finished. But when it was staged in a prison, it reportedly struck a powerful chord with the inmates. Maybe that’s because, in a place like that, “waiting” isn’t an abstract idea—it’s the most concrete thing in the world.