Citation :

Shreyosi Banerjee, 2026. "Masses on Hold: Economic Precarity and Post-Catastrophic Survival in Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”" ESP-International Journal of English Literature and Linguistics Research (ESP- IJELLR)  Volume 4, Issue 1: 27-29.

Abstract :

Samuel Beckett’s widely acclaimed play Waiting for Godot (1952) is typically interpreted as an absurdist play with an examination of existential meaninglessness and futility of human life. My paper attempts to interpret it through the framework of economic precariat and precarity and post-catastrophic survival, drawing on the theory of Guy Standing established in The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class and discussed by James McNaughton’s Samuel Beckett and The politics of aftermath. The paper contends that the four characters- Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo, and Lucky exist within a social order marked by material instability, deferred sustenance, and degraded forms of labour, rather than metaphysical despair. Waiting is conceptualized as a form of unpaid labour, while acts of consumption, bodily exhaustion, and dependency expose the economic logic that structures the play’s world. Through detailed analysis of suspended temporality, the “economy of the leftover,” coerced labour, and the persistence of authority following collapse, this paper demonstrates that Waiting for Godot presents precarity as a prevailing condition. Beckett’s post-catastrophic setting anticipates contemporary manifestations of economic uncertainty, in which survival supplants progress and endurance becomes the principal mode of existence.

References :

[1] Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts. Faber and Faber, 1956. McNaughton, James. Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath. Oxford University Press, 2018. Standing, Guy. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.

Keywords :

Aftermath, Beckett, Labour, Precarity, Waiting.