Throughout time, people have asked themselves what it means to be human. This has the obvious correlate of how one should lead one’s life. If it does not have intrinsic meaning, as many people started to believe in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, then one is left to one’s own devices to make something out of it. Artists have depicted this in many ways; Henry James’ The Beast in the Jungle and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot are two masterpieces that discuss the importance of making the most of one’s time on Earth. They both employ the motif of waiting, with their characters believing that they must spend their time in the hopes that something life-changing will happen in the future. In this sense, James’ The Beast in the Jungle and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot use waiting to show that one should not wait for an external definition of the value of one’s life, but must constantly act towards it, as one’s conscious actions are what define the meaning of one’s existence.
Waiting in the Texts
In these two texts, waiting is a very significant part of the plot. In both of them, the characters are literally waiting for something. In James’ The Beast in the Jungle, it is an undefined life-changing event that would establish the meaning of the main character’s life. On the other hand, in Waiting for Godot, Beckett’s two lead characters are on the wait for Godot, who never arrives.
In Henry James’ The Beast in the Jungle, the lead character, Marcher, has the conviction that something very significant is going to happen that will forever change his life. Marcher is so taken up by this fact that he does not take decisions with respect to other people because he fears that other people will be forever altered by this beast, which would forever change what his life is about. In this sense, some would think that he is an egoist; an example of this would be his hesitation to marry May, as he does not want her to be a subject of this change in life.
Nevertheless, at the end, Marcher realizes at the end of his life that he did not do anything because he was waiting. Marcher sees that he has wasted his life waiting, while he actually could have done something. In this sense, the beast in the jungle could always be seen as present, preying away at Marcher, who thought that it would take him by surprise.
At the end, it actually does, but only because it does not dramatically change him. The surprise is that his life did not depend on the event, but on how he decided not to do anything, waiting for a life-changing event to happen. “Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like a crouching beast in the jungle. It signified little whether the crouching beast were destined to slay him or to be slain” (James). As such, his decision to wait, instead of changing his life for the better by accepting the love of a caring woman, proves to be extremely misguided, as he throws away the great opportunity to live his life adequately.
Similarly, waiting is also a significant concept in Beckett’s play, evidenced in its title, Waiting for Godot. This is a very important name because this is actually all they do: the eponymous character never actually arrives. Therefore, one could state that waiting is the whole subject of the play.
Throughout its different acts, Vladimir and Estragon wait, in vain, for Godot. He never arrives, and they are led to spend their time with each other, simply waiting. They do this during two days, with the second being just as uneventful as the first. Therefore, one can see that the wait becomes a useless routine, which is sustained until the end of the theater piece.
Implications for Humans of Waiting
The Beast in the Jungle can be taken to be the definition of humanity through events. It presents life as a wait for a moment that would establish the meaning of a person’s life. Consequently, it implies that life does not have intrinsic meaning, but its significance is established by an external source.
Nevertheless, the story can be taken to mean just the opposite due to the dramatic and ironic turn of events that the story ends with. The emptiness that the Marcher feels, due to his inability to keep waiting for the beast, voids his life of meaning. Therefore, one could think that his wait for the beast was the real way that he was giving meaning to his life.
As such, one could interpret that one really establishes the meaning of one’s life through the actions that one takes along one’s life. Therefore, one does not have to wait for an outside event to determine what one’s time on Earth means; such waiting would constitute the meaning of a person’s life because it would be what the person dedicates him or herself to doing. As a consequence, no life would be devoid of meaning, but would be a constant imperative to construct meaning. One cannot do anything but define one’s life, even if this is through waiting.
Similarly, in Waiting for Godot, Beckett seems to be taking the position that one must take the conscious decision to act in order to make one’s life have meaning. If one does not decide to do anything, their life will be just a meaningless, absurd succession of repetitive events that end up forming a routine. In the words of Vladimir, “habit is a great deadener” (Beckett), meaning that one’s routine can eventually kill away one’s essence. As his characters do not decide to act, nothing happens throughout the whole play.
Furthermore, this poses a simultaneous problem for the audience as well. They are sitting through a play, or at least reading its script, while nothing actually happens. Besides from the reflection that may stem from considering the lack of action, they are also caught in a passive position with regards to life. They are wasting it away, watching two people throw away their lives. The audience is not only waiting for Godot to appear, but for something to happen, which obviously never will, because the script has already been written. Therefore, one could argue that the audience is who the joke is really on in this play.
Conclusion
Both Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and James’ The Beast in the Jungle show how one always acts in order to define one’s existence, even if this means wasting one’s life away waiting. In both of these texts, the reader can see how the characters are simply waiting for a life-changing event that never arrives. James’ Beast seems to be more elegant in this regard, as it shows how this lack of life-changing events can bring the final, deathbed realization that one’s whole life has been a succession of these moments, yet that one has not seized. On the other hand, Beckett shows this in a more absurdist manner, making the viewers go through a play about nothing that repeats itself, much like people constantly repeat their routines every day.
Far from being complacent, both of these texts invite the audience to act in such a way that they are participants of the construction of their own life, meaning and the world. Therefore, waiting in these texts becomes a way for the authors to demonstrate how one can lead one’s life in an uneventful, sad and ultimately meaningless way. It is astonishing how art can be so profound as to lead one to reflection about the nature of human experience, and so challenging as to provoke changes in how one leads one’s life.
Works Cited
Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts. Grove Press, 04/2011. VitalSource Bookshelf Online.
James, Henry. The Beast in the Jungle and Other Stories. Dover Publications , 20120305. VitalSource Bookshelf Online.
