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Pozzo: You are human beings & [He puts on his glasses.] As far as one can see. [He takes off his glasses.] Of the same species as myself. [He bursts into an enormous laugh.]
Waiting for Godot
Beckett's characters are not really the sorts of people we are familiar with from everyday life or traditional drama. But they do have characteristics that we recognise, and they are not indistinguishable from each other as is made clear by Pozzo's laughter at the idea that he, Vladimir and Estragon are of the same species.
Vladimir and Estragon are to some extent different personalities. The 'unhappy' but more physically resourceful Estragon increasingly finds his 'lousy life' intolerable. Vladimir is more emotional, practical and hopeful: he 'reflects' and 'muses' optimistically.
Winnie in Happy Days, despite her predicament, buried first up to her waist and then up to her neck in sand, is even more cheerful and optimistic:
& no no & can't complain & no no & mustn't complain & so much to be thankful for & no pain & hardly any & wonderful thing that & slight headache sometimes & occasional mild migraine & it comes & then goes & ah yes & many mercies & great mercies & '
Winnie's henpecked husband Willie barely features in Happy Days, but we often meet two contrasting yet complementary characters in Beckett's plays, who like Vladimir and Estragon have a sort of mutual dependence. In Waiting for Godot, Pozzo is a smug materialistic bully, whereas Lucky is abject but capable of imaginative thought and feeling. Rough for Theatre I features a blind man and a physically disabled man who consider the possibility of joining forces in the interests of survival. Act Without Words II is mimed by the slow and awkward 'A' and the brisk, precise 'B'.
But the names here give the game away. On the whole Beckett provides minimal information about character identity. In Act Without Words II, the characters don't speak, and he may also dispense with a character's sight or bodily action, as in Rough for Theatre I, or with bodies altogether, blacking them out with long gowns (Ohio Impromptu) or lighting only the head (Footfalls). Not I features only a faceless mouth, and in Breath there is no visual figure at all.
So Beckett reverses traditional character development, increasingly stripping away details of personality. He is not mainly concerned with aspects of individual identity, but with what it's like to be alive and how we try to cope with it. As Vladimir says in Waiting for Godot: 'At this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us.'
So although the characters may not have complex individual identities, they are deeply human. They are full of self-doubt, chatter to dispel despair but find little comfort, feel vulnerable, have nowhere to go, question their predicament, are bored, must continue doing something simply because they exist, sense the brevity of living and yet feel it seems interminable, contemplate suicide and wait fearfully (for hope is unreliable) for what the end may bring.
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