The two tramps in Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon, are seen awaiting the arrival of Godot for the entire play. In both act 1 and act 2, a boy messenger arrives to inform them that Godot will not appear that day, "but surely tomorrow." Since Beckett plays with time and memory in the play, we are not sure how long they have been waiting. They are both "unreliable narrators" of events both in the recent and not-so-recent past, but it's apparent this is not their fault.
Godot, the character for whom they wait, is one of the most discussed offstage characters of modern literature. The simple—and to a degree, cliched—explanation, is that Godot represents God, therefore portraying that simpleminded humans continue to wait for someone to come (in the case of the Christian concept of Jesus) and that since that someone does not exist, they'll be waiting forever.
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Godot, the character for whom they wait, is one of the most discussed offstage characters of modern literature. The simple—and to a degree, cliched—explanation, is that Godot represents God, therefore portraying that simpleminded humans continue to wait for someone to come (in the case of the Christian concept of Jesus) and that since that someone does not exist, they'll be waiting forever.
But Beckett created a much more subtle and radical play than that. Does it really matter for whom they wait? What or who are we all waiting for? Death? Why is Pozzo waiting to sell Lucky? Isn't it in fact true that the only meaning in an "absurd" and unknowable universe is to be found in the simple relationships that exist here and now?
By the end of the play, the audience has accepted that waiting is all that Vladimir and Estragon will ever know, and yet they go on. They do not hang themselves; they simply go on.
Is Waiting for Godot more about waiting than about Godot?
There are various theories about who Godot is and what he is supposed to symbolize. Samuel Beckett never encouraged the popular idea that Godot is intended to represent God, pointing out that he wrote the play in French, and there is no obvious connection between the French word "dieu" and the name "Godot." Unless one accepts a theory that imposes meaning on the play in this rigid way, Waiting for Godot cannot be about Godot, since he never arrives, and the audience knows nothing certain about him.
Waiting, on the other hand, is a subject which occupies the entire play, which one might describe, dramatically, as 100 percent waiting and 0 percent Godot. The aspect of waiting that is most brilliantly depicted throughout the play is the way in which a person who is waiting is inevitably doing something else but without fully concentrating on it. Vladimir and Estragon discuss a variety of matters in the negligent, abstracted manner of people who are waiting for something to happen, never giving the present moment their full attention. Their reactions to Pozzo and Lucky are the same. In the second act, their indifference to the tragedies that have befallen the other two men has a heartless quality, resembling the boredom with which Vladimir responds to Estragon's troubles at the beginning of act 1. It is by highlighting the act of waiting, and by making the audience pay attention to Vladimir and Estragon's lack of attention, that Beckett depicts the absurdity of the way people generally pass their time, continually looking forward to the next event.