The term resistance was first applied in a description of Palestinian

literature in 1966 by the Palestinian writer and critic Ghasssan Kanafani in his
study, Literature of Resistance in Occupied Palestine: 1948-1966. Resistance
literature proposes an important distinction between literature which has
been written under occupation and exile. Such a distinction presuppose a
peoples collective relationship to a common land, a common identity, or a
common cause on the basis of which it becomes possible to articulate the
difference between the two modes of historical and political existence, That
is occupation and exile. The distinction presupposes furthermore an
occupying power which has either exiled or subjugated, and has
significantly intervened in the literary and cultural development of the
people it has dispossessed. Literature, resisting the subjugation thus
becomes an arena of struggle to claim identity and is termed as
oppositional or resistance literature. Waiting for Godot indirectly presents
this opposition. Though partially, not directly Beckett in Waiting for Godot
opposed the Nazis by portraying almost similar condition of the people who
fled in fear of German force like Beckett- homeless, dispossessed, hopeless,
jobless. Hugh Kenner relates the play with Vichy France in the following
words: It is curious how readers and audiences do not think to observe the
most obvious thing about the world of the play, that it resembles France
occupied by the Germans, in which its author spent the war years.

Samuel Beckett was an active member of the French Resistance

during World War II and afterwards twice-decorated for it. In the fall of 1942
an informer infiltrate Becketts groups and many of his friends were caught
and killed by the Gestapo. Realizing that their cover was blown, Beckett and
his companion, Suzanne put on their coats and left their Paris apartment as if
going for a walk. This pretence eventually became a reality: after two months
in various Paris hideouts, they fled on foot to a remote mountain village in
Southeast France, walking by night and sleeping by day. There they waited
out the rest of the war.
This experience is often offered as a source for the two main characters in Beckett's
Waiting for Godot, the foot-weary, hopeless but ever-expectant, Vladimir and Estragon. Waiting
for Godot is the most written-about play of the 20 th century. Beckett was intensely private. He
was skeptical of language. Beckett experienced writing and living as a psychological and
philosophical agony. He said he wrote Godot as a relaxation, to get away from the awful prose
I was writing at the time. If "new" was what a middle-aged Samuel Beckett was
waiting for, Godot proved to be that and more. The language, said one critic,
made it seem as if previous French plays "had been written with quills, not
pens." Instead of plot, there was a flurry of inactivity, a two-act play in
which, said another critic, "nothing happens twice."

Waiting is at the centre of the play. It resembles the waitng of Becketts

for years. At first the Becketts lived at the village hotel where bedbugs and
mice were everywhere, and where they had to go outdoors, not only for the
privy but also for drinking water. The fields where they searched for potatoes
were often seas of mud. For a time, Beckett worked for a farmer named
Aude and picked grapes for another farmer named Bonnelly, who is
mentioned by name in En Attendant Godot:
VLADIMIR: Pourtant nous avons t ensemble dans le Vaucluse, jen
mettrais ma main au feu. Nous avons fait les vendanges, tiens, chez un
nomm Bonnelly, Roussillon.
The play also presents the homelessness, various struggles like that of
inability to do anything, always tired, and forgetfulness etc. and the pitiful
condition of the people of war time. In the play the main characters Vladimir
and Estragon have no home. Form the play it is apparent that they are in
very poor condition. They dont have enough food, as Estragon eats the
bones left by Pozzo. And Estragon also beat by somebody. At the beginning
of Act I, we read:
VLADIMIR: (hurt, coldly). May one inquire where His Highness spent the
night?
ESTRAGON: In a ditch.
VLADIMIR: (admiringly). A ditch! Where?
ESTRAGON: (without gesture). Over there.
VLADIMIR: And they didnt beat you?
ESTRAGON: Beat me? Certainly they beat me.
VLADIMIR: The same lot as usual?
ESTRAGON: The same? I dont know.
Toward the end of Waiting for Godot, when Estragon (Gogo) and
Vladimir (Didi) are at a momentary low point, the following dialogue takes
place:
ESTRAGON: Im going.
VLADIMIR: Help me up first, then well go together.
ESTRAGON: You promise?
VLADIMIR: I swear it!
ESTRAGON: And well never come back?
VLADIMIR: Never!
ESTRAGON: Well go to the Pyrenees.
VLADIMIR: Wherever you like
ESTRAGON: Ive always wanted to wander in the Pyrenees.
VLADIMIR: Youll wander in them.
In the original French version, Beckett specifies more fully: Nous

irons, Gogo tells Didi, dans lArige, and he adds, Jai toujours voulu me
balader dans lArige. The joke here is that the Arige was hardly a place
suitable for wandering. Also known as Le Chemin de la Libert (later the
title of Sartres trilogy of novels), it was the chief World War II escape route
from France to Spaina route chosen to avoid all official checkpoints and
any likely contact with German patrols.

The word war itself appears nowhere in Godot or in those strange

lyrical fictions of 1945-1946, which were published in Nouvelles et Textes
pour Rien .But the very absence of the word has an odd way of insuring its
prominence in these stories. As the narrator of The Expelled (1945) puts it
sardonically:
Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of
those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you dont
there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little. That is to
say, must think of them for a while, a good while, every day several times a
day, until they sink forever in the mud. Thats an order.
Beckett knows, of course, that nothing is forever, and that he can hardly
obey his own order to put the matter behind him. Little by little, those
killing memories return.
But for the first wave of Beckett critics in postwar Francecritics for
whom war memories were not only painful but embarrassing, given the
collaboration of the Vichy governmentit was preferable to read Beckett as
addressing mans alienation and the human condition rather than anything
as specific as everyday life in the years of Resistance. Jean-Jacques Mayoux
comments:
So man is alone and bereft not only of God, but also of the world: in this
respect Becketts work is a ruthless criticism of experience. Our windowless
monad. . .moves about his inner landscape coming face to face with his own
private mirrors. . . . Always unreal, reality is, in particular, ambiguous, and
the formulae of logic, by which A always remains A at the same time and in
the same connections, no longer apply. . . .At the heart of this unreality is
time, dimension of the absurd, which annuls everything, which is an
unceasing hemorrhage of existence.
Godot, however, bears unmistakable witness to the context in which
it
was born, especially in its original French version. From Estragons first
Nothing to be done, to which Vladimir responds, Im beginning to come
round to that opinion. All my life Ive tried to put it from me, saying,
Vladimir, be reasonable, you havent yet tried everything. And Ive resumed

the struggle (combat), Becketts play dramatizes the tension between

passivity and action that characterizes this very particular form of waitinga
waiting on the part of human beings thrust into a very particularand wholly
unknownsituation.

At the end we can say that like resistance literature, waiting for Godot
presents the struggle of Valdimir and Estragon, the boredom of waiting they
suffered.