https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.085
The Paradox of Hope in a World of Despair: Waiting for Godot
DR. PHANI KIRAN
Associate Professor
Sri Sathya Sai University for Human Excellence
Navanihal, Karnataka
MS. SNEHA
PG Student
Department of English
Sri Sathya Sai University for Human Excellence
Navanihal, Karnataka
Abstract: This paper titled “The Paradox of Hope in a World of Despair: Waiting for Godot” offers a comparative philosophical study of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot through the lens of Indian philosophical traditions, principally Advaita Vedānta, Buddhist thought, and the Bhagavad Gita. Where Western criticism has largely read the Theatre of the Absurd as a terminal condition of meaninglessness, this study suggests that what this play stages is avidyā: the foundational ignorance that mistakes constructed appearance for ultimate reality. The absurd, in this reading, is not a philosophical endpoint but a misperception of the classical Advaita image of rajju-sarpa bhrānti, mistaking a rope for a serpent, where the suffering is real, but its cause is not.
The inaction of Vladimir and Estragon is read through the Buddhist concept of sarrow (Dukkha) and the Gita’s doctrine of action without expecting results (nishkama karma), revealing their waiting not as cosmic tragedy but as attachment to a constructed object of expectation. The study in the conclusion states that the Theatre of the Absurd, read through Eastern metaphysics, is not a theatre of meaninglessness but a theatre of misrecognition. The void is real; what is wrong is the diagnosis. Where Western absurdism stops at the condition, the Indian philosophical tradition identifies its root in avidyā and points, through the ancient question Ko’ham — Who am I? toward the possibility of its dissolution.
Keywords: Theatre of the Absurd, Avidya, Maya, Nishkama Karma, Eastern Philosophy, Existentialism
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