Why do Vladimir and Estragon depend so much on each other?

Beckett is arguably one of the most original authors of all time. On the whole, "En attendant Godot" is the greatest display of theatrical genius after "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" I have ever read. Although this masterpiece of absurd literature still uses the three aristotelian units, Beckett manages to play with them and rearrange them in a very peculiar and innovative way. One of the aspects that catches possibly every spectator's eye is the fact that Vladimir and Estragon are always on stage throughout the whole play. In addition, they both seem to want to get out of their situation and escape their reality but yet Beckett seems to establish a very deep relationship between them which involves dependance. Estragon and Vladimir are unable to live their own separate lives because they need each other and on the course of this essay I am going to try to solve a very simple question: why is that the case?

Firstly, in order to answer the question, I believe we should start by looking at the big picture of existentialism, which is one of the key philosophical inspirations of "En attendant Godot". Although Kierkegaard is viewed as the first existentialist philosopher, we must not lose sight of the fact that by the time Kierkegaard is writing his philosophy, we are starting to see how ideas concerning God's death are starting to develop. Pre-Nietzsche arguments, like those put forward by authors like Dostoyevski, seem to indicate that "God is dead", an expression which, as we all know, will be consolidated and popularized by Nietzsche in books like "Also sprach Zarathustra". One of the existentialist thesis comes to say that it is really up to humans to fill in that gap created by God's death but, according to absurist theories, those attempts to find a ultimate answer for everything will fail. Writers like Camus in the 1940s, whose philosophy is seen as "atheist existentialism", seem to point towards some kind of duality going on between happiness and sadness and, on the other hand between life and death. We come across this idea of trying to look for answers in Act I one when Estargon asks "Where do we come in?", alluding to their role in this reality and the impossiblity to find a definite answer to that question.

Having said that, I would like to investigate Berkeley's anti-realist idealism. This viewpoint is easily summed up in the phrase: "Esse est percipi" (To be is to be perceived) and it leads us to conclude that if we are not perceiving something, that thing does not exist. To illustrate this, if everybody in Madrid goes away right now and nobody perceives Spain's capital city, Madrid would cease to exist. Of course, idealism must deal with the problem of gappiness. In other words, if I turn on my oven because I am bake something and then leave the room, once I return, why is my food baked? There is a gap right there which idealism has to account for if 'to be is to be perceived'. Despite the fact that phenomenalism would deal with this objection by speaking about the possibility of things being perceived, for the sake of this essay, I would like to concentrate on how Berkeley attempted to solve the problem of gappiness. He concluded that there must be a constant perceiver, which we call God, whose existence and whose perception of the oven guarantees that my food is baked once I go back to the kitchen. Although this argument still presents weaknesses, such as who is perceiving the constant perceiver?, I will not deal with that in this essay, since I would like to focus on this idea of a God who is this perceiver.

To relate these illustrations with "En attendant Godot", I think we can state that Beckett's play kind of brings both philosophical views together, since in a godless world, if God is dead, and if to be is to be perceived, we need to be constantly perceived by other individuals. In other words, if the constant perceiver has been eliminated, Vladimir and Estragon must be afraid that if they cease to perceive each another they will both cease to exist and this leads to their constant state of dependance. This principle would also explain why all the other characters go in couples and why Pozzo and Lucky are always together as well and why in Act II the second boy who comes says he is not the same person who went there the other day, the reason being that once the first boy stopped being perceived, he also ceased to exist and so a second boy comes. Therefore we could conclude that this character of the boy is showing a sense of duality and that, in fact this boy, refers to two different boys: The one of Act I and the one of Act II, since, according to the theory, they both stop existing once the other characters stop seeing them. Then, we could infer that the second boy is really the first boy's brother, who is mentioned in Act I.

Nietzsche's influence on Beckett's play can also be seen in the way the characters name each other, as they call themselves Gogo and Didi. The German philosopher would say that these are in fact metaphors which have lost their expressive power and so they become concepts. Additionally, one can appreciate Nietzsche's theory of the eternal return in the essence of the play, which comes to say that we should understand our actions as if they were unique and if we had to repeat them forever.

Going back to the perception argument, there is more evidence to prove the theory I am presenting when Vladimir tells the first boy in Act I "Tell him . . . (he hesitates) . . . tell him you saw us. (Pause.) You did see us, didn't you?". In this case, it is my view that Vladimir is repeating a tautology. He has been speaking to the boy for a while and just before letting him go, Beckett writes in this question tag: "didn't you?", suggesting that Vladimir is unsure of even the most simple of truths and, therefore raising a major philosophical point: the existence of reality itself. We could go one step further and conclude that with this simple question tag, we can infer that Vladimir does not want to prove that the outer world exists, he rather wants to verify that he is being perceived and so that he is still existing.

On the other hand it is apparent that "En attendant Godot" is dealing with the philosophical debate on personal identity. Beckett plays with memory and he sometimes animalizes his characters to break their personalities. A clear example of this point would be the way Pozzo treats Lucky or the constant memory loss that Estragon suffers throughout the whole play. I believe we could relate this argument with the one I put forward when speaking about idealism on "En attendant Godot". David Hume said that we do not really have the idea of "I" in philosophy. What we call "I" is just a way of unifying the different unconnected memories our consciousness has but we cannot directly experience "I". From my viewpoint, in order to experience "I" we should be getting out of "I" and then being able to perceive it and hence, using Hume's expressions, get an idea of "I" after the impression of "I". The philosophical reason as to why we are unable to do this would is that not only is going out of "I" impossible, but that going out of "I" to perceive "I" would lead to an infinite regress, just like the homunculus, because what's the personal identity of whatever is receiving the sense data which helps him develop the impression of "I"? By adding Hume's theory to Berkeley's idealism and applying them to Beckett's play we can say that none of the characters knows they've got a personal identity but the security of being perceived by another character makes them infer that they might exist. X can never get out of X, but Y knows he is perceiving X, so if "esse ist percipi" is correct, from Y's perspective, X exists even if he hasn't got an identity. But still Y doesn't know Y exists and X doesn't know X exists, even if he can infer it by perceiving that Y is perceiving him, inferences give no 100% certainty in philosophy. In this case, this is explained by the impossibility of knowing if the external world exists and by the problem of other minds. X can never get into Y's head. This proposition makes us wonder that X knows Y exists but X doesn't know X exists because he has no certainty that Y is perceiving X and in addition X might not have personal identity at all and viceversa. Therefore the issue is that Vladimir and Estragon need to perceive each other constantly to know that the other one exist but they can never know if they exist. Estragon has the key to Vladimir's existence and Vladimir has the key to Estragon's.     

To conclude, I have ventured so far as to say that the dependence relationships portrayed in Beckett's play "En attendant Godot" can be explained if we look at the broad perspective of both existentialism and idealism and we come to conclude that the play is illustrating some major philosophical ideas. One of them being Hume's skepticism, which introduces a new dimension to the debate and makes us think that even if both characters are perceiving each other and hence that the opposite character exists, they have no certainty to know that they exist. What Beckett seems to be suggesting is that if to be is to be perceived in a godless world, humans desperately need each other.