VLADIMIR:
What do you do when you fall far from help?
POZZO:
We wait till we can get up. Then we go on. On!
This is among the repartee of characters in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. It takes place after Vladimir and Estragon try to help the blind and prostrate Pozzo in Act II, only to fall down themselves in an example of knockabout humor the playwright borrowed from Vaudeville.
Some critics consider “on” the key word in Beckett’s works, suggesting endurance and fortitude in bleak conditions. It has been argued many of his works have as a theme the asymptotic qualities of life, the way things often seem to be deteriorating or winding down without ever reaching a complete ending. In a similar way, in geometry the asymptotic curved line keeps approaching the x or y axes but never touches them. Some readers claim the author’s experience in the French resistance during World War II, which involved continual waiting and what Beckett humbly called “boy scout stuff,” influenced his later writing in this regard. The miscues and distorted communications of the resistance must have required tremendous patience and fortitude.
Waiting for Godot famously ends with a farcical mishap that prevents Vladimir and Estragon from committing suicide. Instead they go “on.” In a similar way, in “Dust of Snow,” Robert Frost used the image of hemlock, a source of poison for suicide, and a crow, traditionally a symbol of death, to demonstrate how small events in the natural world can leaven one’s attitude: