Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Re-reading Waiting for Godot after all these years, in the midst of finishing up Deirdre Bair's biography of Beckett, I'm struck by the simplicity and insistence of the text. Generations now have tried to apply some sort of symbolic system on the play: it's about slavery, it's about the existence of God, it's about communism. Beckett himself always rejected all these sorts of filters, arguing, as a poet might, that it's about the words. Concentrate on the words and exclude ideology, and the weirdness of the words and characters and situation create their own system.