Waiting for Godot Mortality Quotes Page 4

Vladimir is unable to take death seriously, leading us to believe that his earlier humanistic concern for Lucky’s welfare was just his impression of what he thought a person would do.

Pozzo’s view of death seems disturbingly extreme, but he’s actually not telling us anything we don’t know. Death, he says, is inevitable. When a person is born, he begins his fall toward the grave. The only difference between his statement and what is perhaps a more common view of death is the amount of time that passes between birth and death. In our case, a lifetime, in this image, the moment it takes to drop into the ground. However, Waiting for Godot has already shown us that time is arbitrary (think about the conversation in Act I when Vladimir and Estragon try to determine what day it is). If this is true, the difference between an instant and a lifetime is simply a matter of perspective.

This is Vladimir’s response to Pozzo’s statement that life is fleeting and therefore without any meaning – notice how Beckett ties the two arguments together with a repetition of the oh-so-memorable "astride a grave" image. But while Pozzo focuses on the inevitability of death, Vladimir focuses on the banality of life. Life isn’t meaningless because we die, life is meaningless because we "deaden" it with purposeless habit.