Waiting for Godot in Iraq
Yadgar Faeq Saeed
English Language Department, College of Education and Language Charmo University, Sulaimani, Iraq
Email: [email protected]
Published: February 22, 2023
Abstract
Many scholars have written papers on various aspects of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, but the purpose of this paper is different. The researcher attempts to study the play through the eyes of a Kurdish scholar living in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region. Waiting for Godot was written between 1948 and 1949, and after nearly 75 years, there are many clues from the present that tell us that we still live in the Modern Age and that all of the themes highlighted by Beckett in his play and during his epoch are still relevant. In this paper, the researcher will apply some of the characteristics of modern literature found in Waiting for Godot to today’s society and the events that have occurred in Iraq and Kurdistan over the last forty years. Furthermore, this study will address traits such as [waiting, hope, loss of faith, futility, disillusionment, the world as a wasteland, absurdism, and existentialism] as traits that can be found in our contemporary world by using examples from Iraq’s recent history and proving the points with quotes from Beckett’s masterpiece and events that occurred after the 1980s until today. Finally, the researcher employs a variety of approaches to make his points, including historical, moral, and reader response criticism.
Keywords: Absurdism, Beckett, English, Godot, Iraq, Kurdistan, Literature, Modern, Waiting.
DOI: 10.23918/vesal2023v47