Beckett is suggesting that the play breaks with the tradition of drama-as-action and instead offers us something different, a pure view into the characters in a state of inactivity. 

In Waiting for Godot, the two main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, spend days waiting for someone named Godot. A boy comes with a message that Godot is not coming and they continue to wait. The waiting itself is an exercise in futility. Godot is never going to show up and the two characters discuss options such as suicide (which they fail in the attempt), keep waiting, and leaving. They try to leave multiple times, but they can't. So, they keep waiting. The repetition and redundancy express the characters steadfast desire for resolution despite becoming totally frustrated in the lack of results for their time spent.

Godot, as if he were a savior or someone who can give them answers, represents certainty and meaningfulness. Since he never arrives, Vladimir and Estragon are faced with living in a world where certainty and meaning never present themselves. To continue to wait for certainty and meaning, knowing they don't exist, is absurd. Absurdism, in literature and drama, is usually presented in this way: humans searching for meaning in a world where meaning is either always elusive or nonexistent. 

In Samuel Beckett's absurdist classic Waiting for Godot, the title character of Godot never appears. Vladimir and Estragon, the two main characters, wait for Godot throughout the duration of the play, and the audience waits alongside them for a situation that never materializes.

The title of the play is interesting because it tells the audience exactly what to expect from their experience as an audience member, in a literal sense. In traditional works of literature that contain a developed and coherent plot line, the act of waiting implies an arrival of some sort; in the theatre of the absurd, such an arrival is not at all a guarantee. Audience members not only witness the futility of waiting, they also experience the emptiness of such unrewarded anticipation.

Scholars have debated the meaning of the name "Godot," and many believe it to denote God. If this meaning is true, then the act of waiting for Godot can be compared to the act of waiting to see God, an act of faith for many Christians who believe seeing God is the reward for a life well-lived according to Christian principles.

The significance of the title of the play Waiting for Godot is in the futility of waiting for someone who never makes an appearance. The play in two acts is merely a play on the melancholy of daily life and the insanity of waiting for Godot (him or her, the play never says) even when the two main characters are informed that Godot is not coming.

The two main characters in the play are portrayed as tramps who have nowhere to go and nothing to do. While the messenger boy brings the tramps a message that Godot cannot come, the tramps continue to wait. Scholars have stated that one way to interpret Waiting for Godot is as an allegory of the futility of Christians who wait for God to change their lives rather than working for change themselves.

We never find out much about Godot; precisely who or what he is remains something of a mystery throughout Beckett's landmark absurdist play. What's more, he never makes an appearance on stage, which only serves to heighten the mystery further.

Yet a number of literary critics and scholars have, over the years, ventured to suggest that Godot represents God, whose name forms the basis of his own. Godot is absent from stage, waited for by the play's characters, in much the same way that God appears to be absent from a dark, absurd, and meaningless world.

Beckett wrote his play at a time when existentialism was a popular pastime among a certain section of the European intelligentsia, and the variant of existentialism to which they adhered was thoroughly steeped in atheism, pervaded by a sense that there was no God and that individuals had to create their own meaning in a Godless universe.

To a considerable extent, that is what Vladimir and Estragon try to do in Beckett's play while they're waiting for a God(ot), who never shows up. Their failure to do so can be seen as a warning of just how difficult it can be for humans to endow the world around them with meaning and significance in the absence of the divine.

In Beckett's popular absurdist play Waiting for Godot, the titular character never appears and remains a mystery throughout the entire play. The main protagonists, Vladimir and Estragon, are waiting for Godot to arrive, and the act of waiting itself is a choice they make consciously or maybe even unconsciously.

Even though they are constantly informed by Godot's young messenger that Godot will not be arriving, they still decide to wait for him, and this is where the absurd lies. Their waiting actually symbolizes the quest for happiness and fulfillment—the people are wasting their time trying to achieve their hopes and dreams, waiting for something good to happen to them, not realizing that there's actually no real meaning to life. Godot is the metaphorical representation of this lack of meaning, hence why he never actually arrives.

According to some critics and analysts, as well as readers, Godot might also be God, or rather Beckett's interpretation of God; many believe that the name "GODot" and some of the descriptions and religious analogies used to characterize Godot prove this theory. For instance, Vladimir and Estragon are not actively searching for Godot, they're waiting for him to arrive, similar to how Christians await the arrival of the Messiah. Didi and Gogo are waiting for Godot in the hopes that he will save them and they're even worried that he might punish them if they stop waiting for him. Godot is also described as a kind man with a white beard, which is similar to how God is presented in the Bible:

VLADIMIR: Has he a beard, Mr. Godot?

BOY: Yes Sir.

VLADIMIR: Fair or... or black?

BOY: I think it's white, Sir.

One can't help but notice, however, Beckett's pessimistic nature when it comes to describing Godot and the meaninglessness of life, who through the character of Godot implies that this long-awaited "savior" might never come to aid the people and deliver them from evil and suffering and ultimately save their souls.

It is also notable to consider the possibility that Godot hasn't arrived yet simply because he is already there—he's nowhere, and he's everywhere at the same time. Perhaps Godot is all of the characters together, who fail to realize that they are the only ones who can actually determine their path and create their own fate—that they're simply waiting for themselves to take action and make a change in their lives.

In the play Waiting for Godot, the central characters, Estragon and Vladimir, wait for a character named Godot, who never arrives. Godot is therefore a projection of the characters' unrealized and at times vague hopes and dreams. While the characters often refer to waiting for Godot, they cannot recall where they are supposed to meet him (other than knowing in a vague sense that it's by a tree). At times they consider ending their lives but then decide to continue to wait for Godot, though they cannot really determine the benefits or rewards of doing so. Godot represents their vague sense that their lives will eventually have promise or some type of meaning or conclusion, though it's unclear when this promise or conclusion will arrive, if ever. Godot constantly promises to arrive but never actually does so. The vagueness of Godot is one of the absurdist elements of the play and represents the idea that the meaning of life is unclear and perhaps nonexistent.

Though it might not have been the intent of the question, this precise issue marks the purpose of not only the play but of all existence.  The character of Godot marks the driving force of the Vladimir and Estragon because it is for whom they are waiting.  Essentially, the purpose of both characters, the reason why they are there, is to eagerly await the arrival or mere presence of Godot.  Beckett denies that Godot is "God."  Of the many contradictions and complexities that Beckett represented, it would be too simple to presume that the character of Godot would be the higher force.  However, one can make the argument that Godot represents anything for which we are waiting.  Any external force that we believe will answer our queries, stop the pain of modern insecurity, and provide the Sartrean "bad faith" answer of totality can be seen as "Godot."  Both characters believe that Godot will provide the answers, and that this faith in absolutism can be what the character is meant to represent.  It can be a religious force, a material object, a state of being in the world, or anything that is perceived to alleviate the difficulty of living in the modern setting.

The posts above nicely sum up the variety of views that this play offers. We can say that the characters are waiting because, in a way, that is all there is to do. They are waiting for something that is not coming, which I take to be a pronouncement of meaning. They are waiting to find out why they are waiting. But nothing is going to come. This is the logic of the play, a challenging logic in the context of narrative drama. 

The waiting is significant because it represents the substance of the lives of the characters. The "person" they are waiting for is important only insofar as he/it is imbued with a power that the character on stage do not have, i.e., the ability to categorically and finally pronounce or provide a meaning for...well, it's been said, life. 

The waiting is symbolic, or metaphorical.  They are just whittling away their lives.  However while they wait, they are interacting with each other and with a few other brief characters.  The meaning of life is that there is none.  Life is just life!

This play has been the subject of much analysis by literary scholars and students. Some have speculated that the title, 'Waiting for Godot," is a play on "waiting for God," and that the characters are engaged in an existential crisis in which they are searching for the meaning of life, including whether there is a God or any higher power in the universe. Other theories about the play's meaning include the possibility that it may be a metaphor for life itself, and that the ultimate event at the end of waiting is death. The landscape, composed of one bare tree, is symbolic of the Tree of Life which encompasses all aspects of human experience and the potential for experience and transformation.

Waiting for Godot has been described as a story about nothing. Indeed, very little happens in the play: two men, Estragon and Vladimir, wait by a tree for someone else to come to them (Godot) over the course of two acts, but he never does. It is never entirely clear why they are waiting for him. Although they have some interaction with passersby, namely Pozzo and Lucky, the conversations do not seem to have any real point. At many times throughout the play, it seems like the characters are only halfheartedly listening to one another and are instead hypnotized by their own inner monologues.

Sill, this idea of nothing is an important one in the middle of the 1900s, when Godot was written. One of the most prominent existential philosophers and public intellectuals of the time, Jean-Paul Sartre, had just finished writing Being and Nothingness, a book that suggested that humans have no formal guidance in their lives and must decide what is meaningful for themselves. Where they once believed in a god, there is now nothing.

Sartre argues that life's purpose comes from the choices people make rather than what people tell them is meaningful. However, many people waste their lives being told what to do. This is what occurs in Godot and why it is often considered an existential piece of literature. The play may be considered a warning about what happens when people wait for something external to give them guidance, and it should be noted that "God" appears in the name "Godot." If people wait for someone or some entity to give their lives meaning, according to this interpretation of the play, they will ultimately be wasting their lives, as Estragon and Vladimir do.

There is also much despair and doubt in the characters as they wait for Godot to appear. Before the modernist period began, there was a faith in human reason. However, over the course of the modernist movement, bureaucracy, technology, and globalization became more and more powerful, and two world wars shook people's sense of whether humans were, in fact, a source of pure reason. In general, there was some unease about whether people were advancing in a way that was conducive to living, and many artists/writers began to question whether reality was as they once believed it was (leading way to postmodernism, of which Godot stands on the cusp).

The characters in the play reflect these ways of thinking, commenting on how people are "bloody ignorant apes," speculating on whether or not they should kill themselves, and, at the end, wondering if they are dreaming ("Was I sleeping while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now?"). The characters in Godot are sensitive and insecure, even toward their own views of reality, which reflected many people's feelings toward life after the World Wars. Godot distills an attitude, or zeitgeist, into two acts through its characters and their actions.

As in all questions of interpretation, this is a judgment call, and even more judgment is required in this case, because Godot never arrives and his absence is never explained. What's more, since this play is considered theater of the absurd, we must carry with us the possibility that the search for meaning will be frustrated (that we'll always wait for meaning as the tramps wait for Godot).

We must therefore deduce what meaning we can from the information given. The tramps are promised that Godot will arrive; he never does. It seems important that he arrive; he never does. They keep waiting, and weirdness occurs while they do. One of the most common interpretations of Godot is that he is meant to stand in for any final, transcendent answer. Think of the Marxist utopian state; it never really arrives. Think of Heaven; we don't get there and it doesn't arrive. Nor does Jesus, or any final answer. In this model we wait for Godot because that's what our philosophies do: they seek a final summation.

Godot's name also suggests such possibilities. "God" and "ot" which can be read as "aught" (nothing) or "o" (also nothing), or as "God /dot" (in which the entirety of God retreats via perspective to a tiny dot in the distance). Greg

The passage of time is one of the central themes of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which is understandable given that the characters spend the majority of the play doing just what the title says: waiting. Vladimir and Estragon (Gogo) experience time as circular, forgetting what they've already done and repeating the same actions scene after scene as they kill time waiting for someone who ultimately never arrives. As the play continues, time starts to lose all meaning. When the characters can't remember what they have or haven't already done, how can any progress be made? When nothing of consequence ever really happens, by what do the characters have to measure time? I'm sure we've all experienced the way time goes slower than we'd like when we're in states of anticipation. For Vladimir and Gogo, that state of anticipation stretches on and on and on.

It is ironic that the importance of Time in this play is that Time has no importance.  Other than the rhythms of a day (each day, in fact)—waking in a ditch, vaguely remembering having been beaten, foraging in their pockets for a bit of carrot or turnip for “breakfast,” and beginning their “waiting,” until it is dark once more--the two tramps have no recollection or remembrance of “time” because few events punctuate their day.  The coming and going of Pozzo and his minion Lucky does not alleviate their waiting, nor does the boy with a message.  But nevertheless, Didi and Gogo keep repeating the phrase “That passed the time” whenever one of their word-games (which, ironically, can be called “pastimes”) distracts them from their waiting.  That is the central idea of Beckett’s philosophical statement about life: it is waiting, in a universe of meaningless activities that “pass the time,” for Godot to come.  The leaf on the tree in Act II is an ironic time message also: what appears as “seasons,” the passage of the year’s time, is in fact merely slight variations in an endless cycle of nothingness; “We give birth astride a grave; the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”