Waiting for Godot - What Is Everybody Waiting for? : Existential Atheism in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot

After the Second World War, a deep crisis of ideas in Europe pressured people to reconsider traditional world-views and universal values. The French post-war existentialism and the literature of the absurd are two of the most significant products of the European philosophical and literary trends of that time, and Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (1949) was the first one to bring the existential agenda and aesthetics to the theatre scene. This study suggests an analysis of this play as communicating the existential atheistic concept that comprises the idea of God’s nonexistence. The play also conveys another existential idea, that the issue of God’s existence as such is of a minor importance for a human being. The analysis is a close reading of the text of Beckett’s play in the view of some essential principals of the existential philosophical concept formulated by Jean-Paul Sartre in his classical work “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (1946).Validerat; 20120411 (ysko