The absentee is a provoker and truth-teller — in Godot, he may be the truth — but not a consoler. For me, all of this echoes a line in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land — “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” — that is a reference to the appearance of the risen Christ to the disciples on the road to Emmaus. He is not recognised, as if he is not fully there. The significance would have been all too clear to Beckett. He was born on Good Friday, the day of Christ’s death, and, Doran tells me, there are more references to the King James Bible in Beckett than to any other work or author. It has been suggested that all his works happen on the Saturday before the resurrection, when the world is without hope.
I read Beckett for the music because it is the only way to get at the sense of it.
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