Vladimir and Estragon: Character Analysis in Waiting for Godot

Introduction: Two Characters or One?

Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot depicts two vagabonds, Vladimir and Estragon, as its central characters. To the extent that the play's structure accommodates a traditional protagonist, one of them — or both considered as a unit — must fill that role. Yet Beckett is careful to give us reason both to understand Vladimir and Estragon as distinct characters within their own interactions, and at the same time to see them as the same character with different names. This essay examines a few crucial moments in Beckett's text in which the distinctions between the two are either heightened or dissolved, in order to argue why we must ultimately understand them as a unit — and, to some degree, as the same character.

The Boot Scene and the Thieves Leitmotif

At the play's outset, we see a contrast between Estragon engaged in activity — trying to remove his ill-fitting boot, which has injured his foot — while Vladimir idly engages in chit-chat, speculating about suicide:

VLADIMIR: (gloomily). It's too much for one man. (Pause. Cheerfully.) On the other hand what's the good of losing heart now, that's what I say. We should have thought of it a million years ago, in the nineties.

ESTRAGON: Ah stop blathering and help me off with this bloody thing.

VLADIMIR: Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower, among the first. We were respectable in those days. Now it's too late. They wouldn't even let us up. (Estragon tears at his boot.) What are you doing?

Here Vladimir indicates a long history in his relationship with Estragon — tracing it back to the belle époque 1890s in Paris, when Gustave Eiffel's tower was still a new structure, and they might have committed suicide by leaping off it together ("hand in hand from the top") and been "among the first" to use it as a suicide leap. After Estragon removes the boot, however, we get the first clear indication of a fundamental difference between the two characters, one that Beckett will emphasize repeatedly:

ESTRAGON: Nothing.

VLADIMIR: Show me.

ESTRAGON: There's nothing to show.

VLADIMIR: Try and put it on again.

ESTRAGON: (examining his foot). I'll air it for a bit.

VLADIMIR: There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet. (He takes off his hat again, peers inside it, feels about inside it, knocks on the crown, blows into it, puts it on again.) This is getting alarming. (Silence. Vladimir deep in thought, Estragon pulling at his toes.) One of the thieves was saved. (Pause.) It's a reasonable percentage. (Pause.) Gogo.

This passage introduces the larger motif enacted throughout the play: when alone together, the default dynamic is for Vladimir to play the parental or senior role and for Estragon to play the child-like or junior role. Vladimir admonishes Estragon as though he were a son or younger sibling. At the same time, a symbolic leitmotif is quietly introduced in Vladimir's apparent non-sequitur — watching Estragon "pulling at his toes," he muses, "One of the thieves was saved… It's a reasonable percentage." This is an allusion to the account of Christ's crucifixion in the New Testament, in which at least one Gospel specifies that Christ was crucified between two thieves, Dismas and Gestas, on the hill of Golgotha. Christian tradition holds that one of the thieves was saved: Gestas, repenting at the last moment, begged forgiveness and recognized Jesus as the Son of God, which guaranteed his redemption.

The sternest Christian expositor of the doctrine of Original Sin, Saint Augustine, used the Gospel story of the two thieves as an indication of the middle way that humans should pursue in their awareness both of ingrained sin and perpetual divine mercy: "Do not despair, for one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume, for one of the thieves was damned." To some extent, this introduces a sense of profound difference into Beckett's depiction of his two characters: we suddenly realize that they are like two sides of the same coin, and that Vladimir seems to treat salvation or damnation as a statistical probability — "a reasonable percentage" — as though it were a coin toss.

This pattern of images, which recurs as a leitmotif at several successive points in the play, manages to indicate both the likeness and the unlikeness of Vladimir and Estragon. To a certain extent, Beckett seems to be suggesting what it would look like if the same personality — sharing the same material circumstances, abstracted from any social context into an existential portrait of the Shakespearean "poor, bare, forked man" (as the homeless vagrant, not unlike Beckett's Didi or Gogo, is described by King Lear) — were forced to define itself against itself. Didi becomes the older, wiser, authoritative figure; Gogo plays along; but according to this pattern of images, only one of them is going to be "saved" and one "damned."

Vladimir and Estragon Defined Against Pozzo and Lucky

The likeness between the two characters comes into its clearest view when another pair is onstage and Vladimir and Estragon must define themselves in opposition to them. This opportunity is provided by Lucky and Pozzo, and it is instructive to note the separate interactions each of the two leads has with the master-and-slave duo:

VLADIMIR: You want to get rid of him?

POZZO: He wants to cod me, but he won't.

VLADIMIR: You want to get rid of him?

POZZO: He imagines that when I see how well he carries I'll be tempted to keep him on in that capacity.

ESTRAGON: You've had enough of him?

POZZO: In reality he carries like a pig. It's not his job.

VLADIMIR: You want to get rid of him?

POZZO: He imagines that when I see him indefatigable I'll regret my decision. Such is his miserable scheme. As though I were short of slaves! (All three look at Lucky.) Atlas, son of Jupiter! (Silence.) Well, that's that, I think. Anything else?

VLADIMIR: You want to get rid of him?

POZZO: Remark that I might just as well have been in his shoes and he in mine. If chance had not willed otherwise. To each one his due.

VLADIMIR: You waagerrim?

POZZO: I beg your pardon?

VLADIMIR: You want to get rid of him?

Two things are worth observing here. First, there is a hint of a fundamental distinction between Vladimir and Estragon in their different phrasings of the same question. For Estragon, if the master-slave relationship is not working, it must be the slave's fault: "You've had enough of him" implies that Lucky has been a trial for Pozzo to endure. Vladimir, by contrast, repeats ad nauseam "You want to get rid of him?" — which foregrounds subjective desire ("wanting" to "get rid of him") rather than assigning fault to the other party. If Vladimir is the senior partner in their duo, he appears to understand relationships through the lens of his own inner experience, while Estragon externalizes the problem.

Conclusion: Didi and Gogo as a Single Consciousness

By the end of Act Two, it is clear that we are meant to understand both characters as simple expressions of the same consciousness — whether that is Beckett's own (his capacity to invest himself in all the characters of the drama), or some larger allegorical understanding in which Didi and Gogo stand for existential heroes, or French Resistance fighters, or — as is perhaps most suggestive — figures whose Russian and French names mark them as emblems of the two great atheistical revolutions: the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of the First World War era. This would give some sense of why "God" lurks within Godot's name, as though God were merely "lying doggo" — to recall Estragon's own slang phrase for avoiding discovery. However one reads their allegorical significance, it seems clear that Didi and Gogo have meaning only in relation to each other, and so are best understood in the context of the other.