“The Ethics of ‘Parallel Contrasts’ in The Glass Menagerie and Waiting for Godot”

Abstract

This paper seeks to demonstrate the portrayal of the human condition in Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot through physical confinement and the metaphor of “all humanity”. Despite their different setting and representational dynamics, both plays display a universal definition of the confinement of Man within his environment, from which he cannot escape despite aimless struggles. This imprisonment is underlined through bodily discomfort where the means becomes the holder controlling both will and master. Camusian philosophy is employed as basic theoretical framework for the interpretation of both texts. The Myth of Sisyphus deals with the aspects of the absurdity of human life along with the human condition. But it does not see death through suicide as a solution for the absurd lies in the divorce between man and his world and suicide would be running away from it (Camus 6).