Learning about the genre of a piece of literature can help us understand its key features and dig deeply into its meaning, but we must be careful not to limit a literary work by doing this. We can look at Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot as a postmodern play, for instance, but we must also realize that it is not confined to that genre. Let's explore this in more detail.
First, we need to understand the characteristics of postmodernism. Postmodern works are often minimalist in nature. They also tend to shy away from specific meanings, floating rather vaguely and randomly in a disordered fashion. Postmodern characters and narrators are not particularly trustworthy, and readers often cannot figure out what is exactly going on in the work or what point the author is trying to make. Postmodern works also tend to be fragmented, jumping times and scenes and even characters,...
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and they often call attention to themselves as literary works and deliberately interact with other literary works.
We can see that many of these postmodern characteristics appear in Waiting for Godot. The play is certainly minimalist with little setting or character development or plot. Its meaning is vague. The characters discuss seemingly random topics as they wait for someone named Godot, who actually never shows. While the play takes place in one location and over two days, the characters shift quickly, with Pozzo and Lucky turning up blind and mute respectively on the second night. The play, however, basically centers around meaninglessness and dullness, to the point where Vladimir and Estragon cannot even get up enough energy to leave or find a rope to kill themselves. Finally, the play presents intertextuality in its allusions to the Bible, which are veiled but present. There may also be some references to Karl Marx and perhaps some of the classical Greek writers.
In any case, we can see that postmodernism figures heavily in the play, and knowing this helps us identify the play's primary characteristics although, again, we have to be careful not to confine the work too narrowly.
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