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Vladimir: That passed the time.
Estragon: It would have passed in any case.
Vladimir: Yes, but not so rapidly.
Waiting for Godot
A beginning, a progression and an end are usually expected of drama, but in Beckett's plays linear time becomes largely irrelevant and characters often seem stuck in a temporal loop. At the end of Play, for instance, Beckett's stage direction instructs performers to return to the beginning and repeat the performance.
In the mime Act Without Words I, the poor player, finding himself in a desert, is forever thwarted from reaching water or any means of escape. His plight recalls the Greek myth of Tantalus. Every time Tantalus, crazed with thirst, bent to drink from a lake, its waters receded. Luscious fruit hanging from trees was always tossed by the wind out of his hungry reach.
'We are rather in the position of Tantalus,' Beckett wrote in Proust (1931), 'with this difference that we allow ourselves to be tantalised.' So Vladimir and Estragon allow themselves to hope that an event in the future the arrival of Godot will make everything all right. But Godot never comes.
Death might seem an end, and perhaps a release. In Endgame, it seems that time is running out for Hamm and Clov:
Clov: Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. [Pause.] Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap.
Hamm: Moment upon moment, pattering down, like the millet grains of & [He hesitates.] ... that old Greek, and all life long you wait for that to mount up to a life.
But again there's a tantalising catch. Their allusion is to the fifth-century Greek philosopher, Zeno. Zeno proposed that if you pour half of any quantity of seed into a heap, and then pour half of the remaining seed onto the heap, and so on, the nearer you get to completing the task, the slower the heap grows, so it can never be completed. It seems to Clov, then, that 'it'll never end, I'll never go'.
Beckett is also interested in how past and present, event and the memory of it, become confused. In Krapp's Last Tape, an old man listens to a recording he made many years ago of himself, commenting on a recording he made in his twenties. In That Time, similarly, a man at the end of his life is bombarded by information about his past from three different versions of his own voice.
This blurring of time is a constant theme. While Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for Godot, they lose track of the present, the past and the future the time of their crucial appointment.
Estragon: You're sure it was this evening?
Vladimir: What?
Estragon: That we were to wait.
Vladimir: He said Saturday. [Pause.] I think. Estragon: You think. Vladimir: I must have made a note of it. [He fumbles in his pockets, bursting with miscellaneous rubbish.]
Estragon: [very insidious]. But what Saturday? And is it Saturday? Is it not rather Sunday? [Pause.] Or Monday? [Pause.] Or Friday?
The question 'when?' becomes irrelevant when the perception of time as a linear progression is lost. For Pozzo, it has become not only meaningless but a torment:
Pozzo: [Suddenly furious.] Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day like any other day, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day you'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day the same second, is that not enough for you? Is that enough for you?
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