The roots of modern tragicomedy lie in Chekhov, who was the first important modern playwright to make art out of the representation of the qualities of life rather than its actions…. His innovation made possible, though he did not know this, a purely theatrical theater, of which the modern epitome has been reached in the plays of Samuel Beckett. (p. 386)

All of Beckett's plays are "games" for actors. In these games the audience also has a role to play, one that allows a certain freedom for improvisation of response, just as the technique required of the actors also includes a good bit of improvisatory invention. Long before he called one of his pieces Play, Beckett was writing playful pieces (nevertheless in great seriousness) in which the characters were clearly aware that they were participants in games. They engaged themselves in talk and went through numerous gestural routines in order to pass the time and give some structure, however fragile, to an otherwise empty existence. When Beckett implies that life is a game, he does not mean only that it is arbitrary and made up of (perhaps) enjoyable routines; he means also, and more importantly, that it is just something to do. As theater is for the passage of an evening, so life is for the passage of—life. We are all clowns (or servants, or entrepreneurs, or spouses—what is the difference?) wondering if our "bit" is sufficiently long and diverting to fill up the time allotted to us.

Thus, the "routine" supplants the plot. As in Chekhov, a minimal or "shadow" plot exists—namely, a waiting for what will never take place, though we should say perhaps never, for all Beckett's work is in the subjunctive—but this slender slip of a plot is mocked with fine irony by being used to structure each of the two acts almost identically. This means that the plot is insisted upon and made to cancel itself out at the same time. Plot is used to negate plot: it is made into a routine.

As a result the audience becomes aware, as it has hardly ever been aware before, that modern man tends to interpret experience as a plotless sequence of events. Beckett summed up in extraordinarily lucid form the pre-existent intuition that neither history nor the experience of an individual can be read as a "story" with a beginning, middle, and end. It was already known that the Christian plot for history, beginning at the creation of the world, undergoing a peripeteia at the Incarnation, and moving toward an eschatological fulfillment, had lost its authority for modern man. Beckett made many aware that it was not just this particular plot that was waning in power but also the very notion of any plot as a model for the interpretation of human existence.

If, as had been thought, the theater came about as a result of the combination of myth and ritual, Beckett seemed to show that the theater could still be the theater, and in a more fundamental way, if the myth component were taken away from it, leaving only the ritual element. But a ritual devoid of myth is indistinguishable from a game. It is purely a "routine," a positive datum of behavior having no other meaning than its own form.

In Waiting for Godot, nevertheless, mythical and symbolic fragments abound. Yet they are only fragments. As such they can tease interpreters of the play into Freudian, Jungian, Christian, Buddhist, and various philosophical readings of the work. None of these is conclusive because the fragments fit into no whole external to the play. Picked up from here and there, they are unified only within the structure of the play itself, which, being circular, can represent either all or nothing but cannot be pegged anywhere between.

This state of affairs accounts for the Beckett irony, which is so all-inclusive that it is difficult to think of any that might be greater, though more bitter kinds are easily possible. The control over form that Beckett exercises is exquisite and extends to every aspect of the theatrical medium, beginning with an extraordinary, evocative, and nuanced command of language. Seeing him so concerned with form, one is apt to suppose that he must be a modern exponent of classicism. Unlike the true classicist, however, he has not the slightest belief that the form of a work of art can bear an analogical relation to a reality outside itself. Thus when we say … that Waiting for Godot summed up the audience's pre-existent intuition about experience, we must remember that that intuition denied form to everything outside of consciousness. (pp. 386-88)

Like Chekhov, though in a highly simplified and economical way, Beckett is able to represent on the stage the verbal, physical, and psychic motions that belong to our endurance of time. Like Chekhov's plays, his are made up primarily of communications of the qualities of experience. What does it feel like to pass the time in the absence of action? Chekhov answers the question by description, we might say, while Beckett answers it more strongly with poetic understatement. Like Chekhov, he has reduced the moments of purpose and perception in the tragic rhythm to their barest minimum, and again like Chekhov he has found a way to show forth the soft rhythms that remain in the moment of passion, which is now extended to fill the whole play. But even more than with Chekhov, these rhythms are internal, for the social setting has entirely disappeared, and what remains is only a model of the consciousness of Western man, exhausted by history and longing for death, yet not able to imagine, even in death, the surcease of that which is his glory and his damnation—namely, his pellucid self-awareness.

With Beckett the development of modern theater, in reaching its epitome, seems also perhaps to have come to an end. The quest for reality, turned into a query, has no further to go. The theater now casts about for a new way to travel. (p. 389)