Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), irlandais d’expression française et anglaise, peut être considéré comme un des écrivains modernistes du XXe siècle les plus influents. Son nom est surtout associé au théâtre de l’absurde, un style de théâtre des années 50 inspiré des surréalistes et des dadaïstes, dont l’origine était le traumatisme de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Parmi les pièces absurdes les plus importantes se trouve En attendant Godot de Beckett, une pièce connue et jouée dans le monde entier. Ce que Samuel Beckett nous montre dans En attendant Godot est évidemment l’absurdité de la vie, et l’absurdité de ce qui n’est pas encore venu ou déterminé. Le point central dans cette pièce est – malgré l’absence d’histoire, de sens et de but – sa représentation de la condition humaine : les relations, la communication, l’inquiétude et, bien sûr, l’attente. Le but de se mémoire sera d’examiner de quelle manière Beckett révèle son image de la condition humaine à travers d’une pièce rompant avec toute convention théâtrale classique.

In this essay, seven posters from productions of the play "Waiting for Godot" are studied. The purpose is to identify elements in the play's plot that are found in the design of the posters and link them to each other. The question statements is to find out what the posters tell about the plot, how the intermediality shows in the posters and who the posters aimed at. The method of the analysis is based on Gillian Rose's content analysis and Anders Marner's student exercise in semiotics. The results of the study showed that it is the characters' attributes and props, such as hats and trees, that take up space on most posters and thus communicate with the potential audience. The graphics and text in the posters are together active parts of the communication of the story each poster mediates. The model readers can both have a knowledge about the plot and no major pre-understanding of the play's plot depending on the different posters in the analysis.

This essay examines the grotesque in Samuel Becketts wellknown play Waiting for Godot. The play is primarily seen as an icon of absurdism, and it is such not appropriate to examine the play as if it belongs to the litterary genre of grotesque. The primary purpose of absurdism is to reveal the pointless- and emptiness of existence. In order to illustrate these points absurdism will often make use of the common characteristics of the grotesque. With this in mind I present, within this essay, an eximination of whether Samuel Becket makes use of these characteristics to assist his portayal of emptiness in Waiting for Godot. A prior understanding of absurdism is required and i have as such primarly used Martin Esslins famous studies. The studies of the grotesque are mainly represented by two theorists. Michail Bachtin's theory is based around the medieval carnival culture, whose archetype was the duality of the body expressed through the pregnant death. Bachtin seeks to highlight the grotesques close connection with laughter as a relief and covers it's use during the middle ages and the renneissance. Wolfgang Kayser studies the term as it is used during the romanticism and modernism. Kayser describes the grotesque as "cold" and alienating. He describes the word as an ”estranged world”. The analysis relies mostly on Bachtin's theories and examines the play from the viewpoint of the picture of the grotesque body, sense of time, the logic of the upside down world and the connection to the carnivals culture of laughter but also examines if Kayser's theories of the ”estranged world” are compatible. Finally, I reach the conclusion that even though Bachtins theory treats the grotesque in a time long before Beckett's, a reading of Waiting for Godot from the perspective of the carnival culture is interesting.  The laughter and the open, grotesque body, plays as expected a large role in the handling of the emptiness, the cyclic sense of time is found in the play and never ceases to repeat, the upside down world's logic and it's abolition of hierarchies is significant and the world in the play seems alien to itself.

When the Irish writer Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) wrote Waiting for Godot in 1948-1949 he was in a state of artistic depression and confusion. He had already turned to French instead of English and with a manuscript for the stage he made an effort to get away from what he called ”the awful prose” he was working on at that time. Waiting for Godot had its first opening night in Paris in 1953, and during the years since then many different interpretations have been made of this challenging work of art. In this essay, with the meta textual elements in Waiting for Godot as a foundation, I’m reading the drama as a writer’s struggle with his material – not strictly biographical, but with Beckett as an artistic example. Vladimir and Estragon, as well as Pozzo and Lucky, then become personalizations of the voices in the mind of the author, where intellect/reason/analysis on one hand and intuition/feeling/fantasy on the other are working side by side, or as a pair of opposites, to try to get along through conflict and cooperation; conferring, clashing, and complementing one another. Godot will then function as the mystical and driving force, the necessary lack of purpose or fundamental meaning that keeps the artist in touch with art. In this aspect Godot has not to come; his absence is an absolute condition to get the play going, to keep the writer writing, to make all artists continue their lonely, tiresome, difficult work. Waiting for Godot tells us something about the struggle every writer has to face when writing a play, or a novel, or a poem, where he, or she, has to speak with and listen to the inner voices of intuition and intellect and try to get by in spite of the overall sense of hopelessness of it all. Art is at the same time without meaning and of infinite value and I believe that this paradox is alive and working in Waiting for Godot.