摘 要

   第二次世界大战之后的西方戏剧舞台上，绽放了一朵奇葩——荒诞派戏剧，而作为一种新的戏剧形式的出现，《等待戈多》 是戏剧史上真正的革新，也是第一部演出成功的荒诞派戏剧，在艺术上达到了空前的高度。《等待戈多》全剧充满了荒诞的色彩，虽然是一个没有发生什么的两幕剧,但剧中两个流浪汉的空等,却被战后的一代观众赋予无穷无尽的意义。在这部剧中,用荒诞的形式反映了真实的人生和现实的社会, 表现出人类永恒的在无望中寻找希望的现代悲剧以及人生所承受的没有尽头的煎熬，人生就是周而复始的艰辛而又虚无的浪游，揭示了人在世界中处于孤立无援、恐惧幻灭、生死不能、痛苦绝望的境地。本文将从主题，故事情节，人物，语言以及舞台的设置背景几方面来研究《等待戈多》中的反传统戏剧和荒诞色彩，进而来解读人类生存状况的荒诞性和人类生存的终极意义——即无意义无止尽的等待。

关键词：荒诞性, 反传统戏剧，人生

Abstract

After the world war two, the absurd theatre blossomed on the western drama stage like a miracle. And as the emergence of a kind of new forms of drama, Waiting for Godot was a true innovation in dramatic history, and also was the first successful show which met an unprecedented height in the art of absurd theatre. Waiting for Godot was filled with the color of absurdity. Though it is a two-act play where nothing happens", but the two tramps’ ineffectual waiting was given endless significance by postwar generation of viewers. In this drama, the writer used the absurd form to reflect real life and realistic society, to show a modern tragedy where humans searched for hope eternally in desperation and life was under no end of suffering, to expose life was the cycle of hard and unnecessary wandering, and to reveal the people in the world were in a friendless and hopeless situation where fear was disillusioned and life or death couldn’t be chosen. Therefore, through the research of absurdity from these aspects—theme, story plot, characters, language and setting in Waiting for Godot, this paper will read the absurdity of human survival conditions and ultimate meaning of human existence-- the meaningless and endless waiting.

Keywords: absurdity, anti-traditional theater, life

Chapter 1 Introduction
The term "Theatre of the Absurd” that firstly was defined by Martin Esslin in a book of the same name refers to a particular type of play which first became popular during the 1950s and 1960s in Paris. Early in 1942, French philosopher Albert Camus had described “in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.”Later, an English critic, Martin Esslin put the label on the absurd theater playwrights who all openly rebelled against conventional theatre to describe a picture that we human beings are completely agnostic about the future and detached from the mechanism of the whole world. According to Martin Esslin, "Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose.... Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, and useless."