Waiting for Godot Lesson Plan

Early in his career, Beckett was influenced by Irish modernist writers such as James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, the scope of Shakespeare's tragic plays and the slapstick humor of his comedies, the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, as well as older sources such as Dante Alighieri's The Inferno, the Bible, and St. Augustine's Confessions. All of these influences can be traced in Waiting for Godot, as can the influence of Beckett's French contemporaries, particularly existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. More specifically, Godot seems to respond to Sartre's 1944 play No Exit, which depicts three characters stuck in a situation that none of them is able to...