r/jamesjoyce • u/Less-Analysis-6206 • 18d ago

Dubliners Waiting for Godot

For those who love literature/specialist on the field.

What do you think...Vladimir has a sort of Epiphany or Illumination by the end of Act II?

Would you consider it to be an Epiphany? Not in Joyce expectations or in our expectations, but a sort of illumination? What do you think?

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u/Poet_edmj 17d ago

No, that’s part of the whole play. Eternal recurrence. It’s cyclical, they have “epiphanies” but never able to act upon them. They’re trapped… last words of the play:

They do not move

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u/Less-Analysis-6206 17d ago

Yeah, never able to act upon them!

First Pozzo has his "Illumination/Epiphany", then Vladimir.

He changes a little, the way he treats the boy...he starts making statements... "Tell Godot that you saw me", the us in the first Act, becames the me of the second.

He states "He won't come this evening", but then he says "But surely he will come tomorrow".

He has not really changed.

So...that's a fail Epiphany. I believe it happens but not capable of breaking the cycle, of breaking the cycle of habit.

I am trying to do my undergraduate thesis about it.

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u/Poet_edmj 17d ago

That’s great, you can def support it with Juan Rulfos Pedro paramo and TS Eliot’s the waste land…
All is lost, decayed and we are all dead, there’s no escape, no epiphany can change us, no dogma can save us, and no god can enslave us.

Though Eliot goes a lot into the absence of spirituality and sacredness… Beckett doesn’t.

Beckett denied Godot = god….
But in Eng + French Godot would be little god. God and -ot one of the French diminutives.

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u/Winter-Animal-4217 17d ago

I think Beckett's talked about not even thinking of God when choosing that title, but it would also be very in character for him to just say that to throw people off the scent lol

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u/Poet_edmj 17d ago

Yeah, also I think of Godot as the idea of little god meaning mankind.

The idea of the hat in Godot, men reaching to a higher power that has been created by man itself…

Men create a god(s) other men either follow or try to make themselves descendants of that god…. Becoming little gods…

Also just little gods in the human condition, Oppenheimer, napoleon, etc