SOURCE: Haney, William S, II. “Beckett Out of His Mind: The Theatre of the Absurd.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 34, no. 2 (fall 2001): 39-55.

In the following essay, Haney uses Eastern philosophies to explain the levels of consciousness in Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Endgame.

Introduction

Playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Harold Pinter write in a context in which traditional narratives, or what Lyotard calls grand or metanarrative (31-35), no longer inspire confidence, leaving society with a sense of alienation and loss. These dramatists were impelled by their historical and cultural contexts to explore the mind's reality through a medium that involved the physical embodiment of characters on stage, in spite of the absence of decisive meaning. As Martin Esslin has pointed out, going from the medium of language and a reliance on meaning or conceptuality in communication toward a concern with immediate experience belongs to...