SOURCE: Kern, Edith. “Drama Stripped for Inaction: Beckett's Godot.” Yale French Studies 14 (winter 1954-55): 41-7.

In the following essay, Kern studies the characters in Waiting for Godot and contends that they are analogies for the entire human race.

Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot was staged—with extraordinary imagination and sensitivity—by Roger Blin at the Théâtre de Babylone in 1953. Critics immediately hailed it as the masterpiece of the season, as the greatest theatrical event since the first French production of a Pirandello play. Jean Anouilh called it the “musichall sketch of Pascal's Pensées performed by the Fratellini clowns,” and Dussane wrote, in Samedi-Soir, of “an almost Shakespearian clownery from which suddenly a kind of creaking poetry jumps in your face like a Jack-in the-box.” In Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Frankfort and other German cities where the original cast toured to present the play, reactions were equally fervent...