ABANDONING THE EMPIRICAL:

Repetition and Homosociality in Waiting for Godot

Andrea L. Yates

Much has been written on Beckett’s use of repetition in Waiting for

Godot but none have addressed the ways in which this repetition in-
forms the relationship of the two men. To assume that either is simply
a tool for comic effect, or that the one has no relation to the other is to
lose the ways in which the play explores relationships between two
men. This article addresses the ways in which repetition both affects
the relationship of these two characters and is a reflection of that
relationship. I will argue that their relationship, and the repetitive
behavior and dialogue on which it is predicated, constructs the only
‘truth’ that Vladimir and Estragon know, and that the shared recog-
nition of that ‘truth’ is their fundamental bond.

There are friends to whom one abandons the empirical and

friends to whom one confides the essential. Friendship is this
as well.
(Derrida, 2000, 84)

Other parts of Beckett’s work might seem a more obvious choice for a
discussion of repetition; Watt, for example, comes to mind. But Wait-
ing for Godot offers a unique opportunity to put this device into dia-
logue with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s neologism “homosocial”, a term
which refers to the problematization of men’s relationships with other
men. In Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist Anthony Cronin inter-
estingly likens the relationship of Vladimir and Estragon to a mar-
riage. “There is the comedy of the married couple, deeply conscious
of each other’s weaknesses, but bound indissolubly by need, custom
and, mysteriously, even love” (Cronin 391). Note that Cronin’s astute
observation about the characters’ relationship qualifies the love as
mysterious. Why “mysteriously love”? This analogy overlooks the
crucial specificity of the male bond. That is, the heterosexuliazed term
“marriage” masks the unique nature of a same-sex bond and the ways
in which that bond expresses itself because of societal pressures. In
Waiting for Godot, this bond is both predicated on and resultant of
repetition. Vladimir and Estragon’s repetitive and rhythmic behavior
and dialogue functions as both cause and effect and constructs the
only ‘reality’ that these two characters know. The shared recognition
of this ‘reality’ and the ‘truths’ it masks produce their fundamental
bond.
Critical discussion surrounding the play discusses repetition
with recourse Beckett’s self-translation, to its function as a de-
centering agent, as a figuration of negation and as a tool for comic
effect. Like the play, the term repetition itself has a rich critical at-
mosphere surrounding it. Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin talk of
testimony and works of art respectively as having repeatability as a
condition of possibility – that is, both must be singular and universal
at once.1 This suggests a simultaneity which resonates with the duel
function of repetition as it relates to Vladimir and Estragon. Gilles
Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition is a text crucial to any critical
discussion of this term. Deleuze divided repetition into the clothed and
the naked.2 The mechanical, or naked, preserves for Deleuze the on-
tological hierarchy of the original as privileged over the repetition,
while the disguised or clothed repetition adds to or in some way af-
fects the original rather than blindly copying it. This subversion of the
platonic parasitic conception of repetition is both explicated and col-
lapsed in Waiting for Godot. While the dialogue and action of the play
presents a Deleuzian naked repetition (that is, the repetition blindly
copies that which is repeated) the larger critical work being done by
the play makes graphic a disguised repetition that not only reiterates
but re-presents the characters ways of knowing each other, and the
audience/reader’s way of knowing a certain kind of relationship.
Deleuze’s argument is inclusive, as well, of a discussion of the
repetition of habit, which he describes as referring to a “fusion of suc-
cessive tick-tocks” that constitute “our habit of living, our expectation
that ‘it’ will continue, that one or two elements will appear after the
other, thereby assuring the perpetuation of our case” (74). The “fu-
sion” that for Deleuze exists in the “contemplating mind” is drama-
tized in Godot through the characters’ use of and dependence on their
repetitive actions and dialogue. The habit they have fallen into assures
the “perpetuation” of their “case”. The habit both produces this per-
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petuation and is produced by it, out of need for each other’s company
and for a way to pass the time. Part of this need, and intrinsic to it, is
tied to recognition.
Deleuze describes a “repetition of need” and states that repeti-
tion is “essentially inscribed in need, since need rests upon an instance
which essentially involves repetition: which forms the for-itself of
repetition and the for-itself of a certain duration” (77). The relation-
ship of need to repetition is crucial to the relationship of Vladimir to
Estragon. Though it is Estragon whose dialogue most often repeats
itself, the two also repeat each other and the play makes graphic the
repetitive nature of their days: Gogo gets beaten up; they are visited
by Pozzo and Lucky; the boy comes; they wait. Despite repetitive
visits by the recurring characters, Vladimir and Estragon are the only
ones who recognize and remember each other. The boy, Pozzo and
Lucky re-appear but do not remember Didi and Gogo. In fact though
Vladimir ostensibly remembers them, he also doubts himself. “We
know them I tell you. You forget everything. (Pause. To himself.)
Unless they’re not the same…”. To Estragon’s “Why didn’t they rec-
ognize us then?” Vladimir replies that “nobody ever recognizes us”
(32). Thus it would seem that Didi and Gogo need each other to re-
member as much as to be remembered by. Without each other they
would be looking at a mirror with no reflection and the reflection veri-
fies their own existence. As Connor argues, “It is repetition that makes
the difference, for it demonstrates to us that the sense of absolute
presence is itself dependent upon memory and anticipation” (119).
“We always find something, eh Didi,” Estragon says, “to give us the
impression we exist?” (44).
In On the Margins of Discourse, Barbara Herrnstein Smith dis-
cusses need in terms of listening. “Of the strictly physical afflictions
to which we may fall victim through such misfortunes as exile, im-
prisonment, illness, and old age, perhaps the one most acutely felt is
loneliness – which means, among other things, the sheer unavailability
of listeners” (108). Consider the importance of listeners in the context
of Waiting for Godot:

Vladimir: Gogo!...Gogo!...GOGO!
Estragon wakes with a start.
Estragon: (restored to the horror of his situation). I was
asleep! (Despairingly) Why will you never let me sleep?
Vladimir: I felt lonely.
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 Estragon: I had a dream.
Vladimir: Don’t tell me!
Estragon: I dreamt that —
Vladimir: DON’T TELL ME!
Estragon: (Gestures towards the universe)This is enough for
you? (Silence). It’s not nice of you, Didi. Who am I to tell
my private thoughts to if I can’t tell them to you?
Vladimir: Let them remain private. You know I can’t bear
that.
(11).

Smith goes on to argue that when “there is ‘no one to talk to’ (note
that we far more rarely complain of no one to listen to), we are mani-
foldly deprived; for, lacking listeners, we not only lack the opportu-
nity to affect others instrumentally, to secure their services in minis-
tering to out physical needs and desires, but we also lack their services
in providing […] cognitive feedback, that is the occasion they offer us
to verbalize and thus to integrate, discriminate, appreciate, and indeed
experience our own otherwise elusive perceptions” (108-9). Smith’s
words work with the previous exchange between Vladimir and Es-
tragon in two crucial ways. Without each other, Vladimir and Es-
tragon not only have no one to recognize or who recognizes them,
they have no one to effect, to affect, and no one to experience their
own perceptions and emotions through and this is, as Smith suggests,
tantamount to having no experience at all; indeed, no reality. Note that
Estragon wants to tell his dream to Vladimir, to have his friend share
that experience. And, note that Vladimir refuses to listen, as he also
recognizes the shared experience in which this act will result. Thus,
though Vladimir woke up Estragon to assuage his own loneliness, he
is unwilling assuage his friend’s. Both acts however confirm that each
has the ability to confirm or at least recognize the ‘reality’ of the
‘other’ even if at times they are unwilling to do so. If they are the
reflection in each other’s mirror the repetitive aspects of their relation-
ship are the verbal and physical manifestations of that reflection. If
someone repeats what I say and do I know not only that I am not
alone, but that I have been heard, that my voice has been recognized.
While the repetition sets into relief this recognition it is also a figura-
tion of a kind of negation – Vladimir is heard by Estragon and vice
versa, but nothing is really or significantly ‘said’, no change is ef-
440
fected; nothing happens as Vivian Mercier famously points out, twice.
Thus as the repetition dramatizes the ineluctable banality and mun-
danity of their existence it simultaneously frees the two characters
from actually discussing the desperateness of their situation; it in ef-
fect protects them from certain ‘truths’. When Estragon attempts to
reveal a truth, that of his dream, he is immediately cut off by Vladimir
who is unwilling to hear the dream and who is, as Smith suggests,
more interested in someone to talk to than in someone to listen to and
who in this way remains protected in conversation that is tantamount
to silence.
If the repetition informs the friendship in that it provides the re-
flection and recognition the two need, it is also a reflection of that
friendship in that it provides an outlet for affection they can in no
other way express, and it masks the need that they have for each other
by preserving certain illusions which, when fractured, reveal a reality
more frightening than the one established within the context of the
friendship. They have, at least, an ‘other’ to repeat and to be repetitive
with. Certain routines – Didi giving Gogo a carrot, Gogo telling Didi
about his being beaten up, their exercises “Vladimir: Our elevations;
Estragon: Our relaxations; Vladimir: Our elongations. Estragon: Our
relaxations (49) – and certain phases (“Vladimir: So am I; Estragon:
So am I”) are repeated, re-presented and provide an apparent source of
comfort to one or both of the characters. Although it is Vladimir who
ostensibly takes care of Estragon, it is most often Vladimir who seems
to need Estragon’s presence. It is he who wakes Gogo up because he
is lonely and he who need to hear that Gogo is happy to see him. This
synthesis of loneliness and need is the text’s concomitant illustration
of Deleuze and Smith’s thought.

Vladimir: You must be happy, too, deep down, if only you

knew it.
Estragon: Happy about what?
Vladimir: To be back with me again.
Estragon: Would you say so?
Vladimir: Say you are even if it is not true.
Estragon: What am I to say?
Vladimir: Say, I am happy.
Estragon: I am happy.
Vladimir: So am I.

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 Estragon: So am I.
Vladimir: We are happy.
Estragon: We are happy. (Silence) What do we do, now that
we are so happy?
(38-9)

If repetition is a tool with which the relationship is reflected or ex-

pressed, why would such a tool be needed? That is, why must their
closeness be expressed in some ‘other’ way? Repetition, it has been
argued, is a figuration of negation in the play, but its function is si-
multaneously productive. In an essay called “The Exhausted” Deleuze
discusses alternatives to ‘language’. “If one thereby hopes to exhaust
the possible with words one must also hope to exhaust the words
themselves” (156). In Waiting for Godot, repetition functions as a
language; using language, but creating new meaning and thus subverts
what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls homosexual panic3. This is not to
suggest that Vladimir and Estragon have a sexual relationship, but that
the ways in which they relate to one another are informed by a contin-
uum inclusive of both homosexuality and what Sedgwick calls homo-
sociality. Because male friendship and male sexual relationships exist
on the same continuum, all signs of male affection become suspect
and other outlets of affection are necessitated by this problematiza-
tion. “Homosocial is a word occasionally used in social sciences […]
it is a neologism, obviously formed by an analogy with homosexual,
and just as obviously meant to be distinguished from homosexual” (1).
Sedgwick goes on to argue that the “potential unbrokeness of this
continuum is not a genetic one – I do not mean to discuss genital ho-
mosexual desire as at the root of’ other forms of male homosociality –
but rather as a strategy for making generalizations about, and marking
historical differences in, the structure of men’s relations with other
men” (2).
Sedgwick’s work is crucial to this reading of Godot in that she
not only looks at the ways in which men relate with other men so-
cially, but she does so in the context of literature and to the exclusion
of women, who are of course notable absent from the play. In fact, her
argument states that the homosocial continuum is entirely different for
women, with less recourse to homosexual panic. “The diacritical op-
position between the ‘homosocial’ and the ‘homosexual’ seems to be
much less thorough and dichotomous for women in our society than
442
for men” (2). Crucial for Sedgwick is that the homosocial and the
homosexual exist on this same continuum and that, for this reason,
homophobia necessarily affects the behavior of both. She states that
“[n]onhomosexual identified men are subject to control through ho-
mophobic blackmailability” (90).

Estragon: You wanted to speak to me?...You had something

to say to me?...Didi?
Vladimir: (without turning) I have nothing to say to you.
Estragon: You’re angry? Forgive me…Give me your
hand…Embrace me!...Don’t be stubborn! (Vladimir softens.
They embrace.)
Vladimir: What do we do now?
(11)

This fight, as well as other similar ones found in the play 4, is figured
as one of Vladimir and Estragon’s many attempts to pass the time but
can also be read as making graphic the problematization that Sedg-
wick addresses. That is, men cannot embrace or otherwise show af-
fection without a ‘good reason’, here their argument. They ‘need’ the
fight as a condition of possibility for the embrace. Not only does the
fight provide an excuse as it were for physical contact as a show of the
affection of friendship, it also provides an outlet for the hopelessness
the men feel but avoid discussing. The fight therefore saves them from
admitting that they feel affection but also that they feel a despair so
intense that it might warrant the need for an embrace.
The play dramatizes that Vladimir and Estragon need each
other, but that they need equally to believe that they do not need, both
because of the homosocial implications as described by Sedgwick and
because of the protection or illusion that their peculiar friendship
gives them.

Obviously it is crucial to every aspect of a social structure

that heavily freighted male bonds between men exist, as the
backbone of social form or forms. At the same time, a con-
sequence of that structure is that any ideological purchase
on the male homosocial spectrum – a perhaps necessary ar-
bitrary set of discriminations for defining, controlling, and
manipulating these male bonds – will be a disproportion-

443
 ately powerful social control. The importance – an impor-
tance – of a category ‘homosexual’ I am suggesting comes
not necessarily from its regulatory relation to a nascent or
already-constituted minority of homosexual people or de-
sires, but from its potential for giving whoever wields it a
structuring definitional leverage over the whole range of
male bonds that shape the social constitution.
(86)

They need each other; they don’t know how to express the need, and
they resent both the need itself and the inability to communicate it. As
was mentioned earlier, in addition to the relationship between repeti-
tion and homosociality, the friendship between Vladimir and Estragon
also creates a reality which masks ‘truths’ the two characters might
rather not recognize. This mask, or illusion, remains in the custody of
the friendship. As Jacques Derrida states in The Politics of Friendship;

the protection of this custody guarantees the truth of friend-

ship, its ambiguous truth, that by which friendship is
founded – more precisely, which enables it to resist its own
abyss. To resist the vertigo or the revolution that would
have it turning around itself. Friendship is founded, in truth,
so as to protect itself from the bottom, or the abysmal bot-
tomless depths.
(53)

What are these truths, both masked and created within the play? What
bottomless depths do Vladimir and Estragon need desire protection
from?

Vladimir: Let us not waste our time in idle discourse!

(Pause. Vehemently) Let us do something while we have the
chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed
that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case
equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were ad-
dressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at
this place, at this moment in time, all mankind is us, whether
we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too
late! Let is represent worthily for once the foul brood to
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 which a cruel fate has consigned us! What do you say? (Es-
tragon says nothing.) It is true that when with folded arms
we weigh the pros and cons we are no less a credit to our
species. The tiger bounds to the help of his cogeners without
the slightest reflection or he slinks away into the depths of
the thickets. But that is not the question. What are we doing
here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we
happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion
one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to
come…Or for night to fall. (Pause). We have kept our ap-
pointment and that’s an end to that. We are not saints, but
we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast
as much?
Estragon: Billions.
(51)

Although Vladmir mentions that one thing alone is clear, he goes on

to offer two possibilities thus showing the illusion that there is ‘a’
truth; this is dramatized again when Estragon, in a rare moment of
lucidity, points out their lack of accomplishment, their lack of singu-
larity with his “billions”. Though the repetition is structurally and
textually important, it is equally important to note that nothing signifi-
cant is actually said and then repeated, no progress made; rather, the
repetition in this way is, as has been discussed, tantamount to a kind
of silence and this silence is, in Derridian terms, crucial to the preser-
vation of the friendship – it produces a reality that in essence allows
the characters to deny certain other (potential) realities: Godot is not
coming, they cannot do without each other though they threaten to
leave, and there is nothing unique about them or their situation. Not
only does the repetition create an illusion to mask certain ‘truths’ and
in so doing avoid certain unhappy realizations (like Estragon’s “bil-
lions”), but is also masks the illusion that there is a truth at all. The
fact that there are so many possible truths (they are waiting for Godot
or for night to fall) rather than a singularity that can ever be attained is
almost as frightening as the prospect of their interminable wait. This is
dramatized in the plays confessional moments.

Vladimir: Tomorrow when I wake, or think I do, what shall I

say of today” That with my friend, Estragon, at this place,

445
 until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed
with his carrier and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all
that what truth will there be? He’ll tell me about the blows
he received and I’ll give him a carrot.
(58)

The characters are looking for an end, a closure represented by Go-

dot’s anticipated coming but the play emphasizes a process – of pro-
ducing truths, establishing realities, and of sustaining friendship.
Beckett’s use of repetition is at once a propellant of this process and a
figuration of its frustrating effect on participants who do not under-
stand the rules of the game. The play often progresses repetitively but
the condition of possibility for repetition is that it re-figures what has
already past. Deleuze addressed the relationship of repetition to tem-
porality in Difference and Repetition:

The past does not cause one present to pass without calling
forth another, but itself neither passes nor comes forth. For
this reason the past, far from being a dimension of time is
the synthesis of all time which the present and the future are
only dimensions. We cannot say that it was. It no longer ex-
ists, it does not exist but insists, it consists, it is. It insists
with the former present, it consists with the new or present
present. It is the in-itself of time as the final ground of the
passage of time. In this sense it forms a pure, general, a pri-
ori element of all time. In effect, when we say that it is con-
temporaneous with the present that it was, we necessarily
speak of a past which was never present, since it was not
formed ‘after’. It’s a manner of being contemporaneous with
itself as present is that of being posed as an already-there,
presupposed by the passing present and causing it to pass.
(82)

For Beckett, in this play, cause and effect are as Derrida might say,
neutered5 as the opposition between the two is overcome and the
repetition itself is always already as important as the words and ac-
tions it repeats, rather than subjugated to them. As Steven Connor
points out,

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 Repetition is different of course from simply copying or
imitation, for repetition aims to cut out every vestige of dif-
ference between itself and its original. Repetition aspires to
the condition of an invisible membrane that encloses its
original without impeding access to it in any way, or inter-
fering with its nature. But even this close self-effacing ser-
vitude displaces the authority of the original.
(4)

The earlier comparison between repetition and silence brings us back

to the though of Derrida. “That is why friendship had better preserve
itself in silence” he writes “and keep silent about the truth […] The
truth of the truth is that the truth is there to protect a friendship that
could not resist the truth of its own illusion” (1994, 53). Derrida’s way
of knowing friendship, as based on abyss and protecting illusion (for
example, that Godot will come) is hospitable to an understanding of
the relationship between Vladimir and Estragon. As Anthony Uhl-
mann points out in Beckett and Poststructuralism when he discusses
the scene in which Didi and Gogo discuss the Gospel 6:

What is even the truth of your own voice were brought into
question, or further still the existence of your own voice?
Your own voice as a source that is, the source of your own
story. How could the voice be said to be your own when it
merely recounts stories which may concern you, but always
at one remove? One begins to feel the ground fall away.
(155)

Just as the boy can be said to verify the existence of Godot – since
someone must have sent him – Vladimir and Estragon verify each
other’s existence and the reality they share. This protects the ground
beneath them even if at times it does quake. The repetition in Waiting
for Godot helps to mask these quakes, to convince Vladimir and Es-
tragon that they do indeed exist and to silence at least temporarily the
meaninglessness of that existence. As Derrida contends “[f]riendship
does not keep silence, it is preserved by silence. From its first word to
itself, friendship inverts itself. Hence it says to itself, saying this to
itself, that there are no more friends: it avows itself in avowing that.
Friendship tells the truth – and this is always better left unknown”

447
(1994, 53). In Waiting for Godot, ‘truths’ are both veiled and revealed
by acts of repetition.

Notes

1. See Derrida’s Demeure and Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age

of Mechanical Reproduction” for their discussions on reproduci-
bility and repeatability.

2. Steven Connor’s Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text

(cited at the end of this essay) includes a very fine discussion of
Deleuze’s “naked” and “clothed” repetition. See also, his chapter
“Presence and Repetition in Beckett’s Theatre” which includes a
fascinating discussion of Godot. While his book was crucial to the
development of this essay, my own argument attempts to move in a
different direction, the relationship of Vladimir and Estragon.

3. Sedgwick describes this term thusly: “So-called ‘homosexual

panic’ is the most private, psychologized form in which twentieth-
century western men experience their vulnerability to the social
pressure of homophobic blackmail” (89).

4. See also pages 48-9 in which Vladimir and Estragon engage in a

similar altercation followed by a similar embrace.

5. “The neuter is the experience or passion of a thinking that cannot

stop at either opposite without also overcoming the opposition”
(Derrida 1994, 90).

6. Vladimir and Estragon discuss the thieves the Gospel relates as

being crucified with Jesus:
Vladimir: But one of the four says that one of the two was saved.
Estragon: Well? They don’t agree and that’s all there is to it.
Vladimir: But all four were there. And only one speaks of a thief
being saved. Why believe him rather than the others?
(9)

448
 Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove P, 1982).

Connor, Steven. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, and Text (New York:
Basil Blackwell, 1988).
Cronin, Anthony. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (New York: Harper
Collins, 1996).
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. (New York;
Columbia U P, 1994).
–, “The Exhausted.” Trans. Anthony Uhllman in Gilles Deleuze: Essays
Critical and Clinical (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993).
Derrida, Jacques. Demeure. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford
U, 2000).
–, Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1994).
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Ho-
mosocial Desire (New York: Columbia U, 1985).
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. On the Margins of Discourse (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1979).
Uhlmann, Anthony. Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge, UK: Cam-
bridge U P, 1999).

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