الفهرس 
Aprelude to the beckettian and the stoppardian absurdist worldsOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
This study shows how the plays in question; namely, Beckett’s Waitingfor Godot &
Endgame and Stoppard’s Jumpers & Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead accurately
exemplify the condition of the twentieth-century man, whose existence is entirely absurd.
Hence, his universe abounds in uncertainty, ambiguity and. meaninglessness. Yet, such a
meaningless life should come as no surprise. As this modern man lives completely out of
harmony with his universe. All his attempts to reach a cohesive meaning, or even to locate
a rational reasoning, within the bounds of logic, for his ambiguous situation, are doomed to
failure. However, he attempts every now and then to find out the truth of his existence, but,
unfortunately, in vain. These endless failures give birth to nothing but a sense of alienation
and hopelessness.
This is certainly behind the Beckettian and Stoppardian endeavor to make their
dramas true articulations of the crisis of the human condition from different angels. To this
end, the plays concerned present their audience with such an image, tending primarily to
confront modem humanity with its stark reality, with the very truth of its dilemma. In this
sense, this confrontation helps to ”make man aware of the ultimate realities of his condition,
to instill in him again the lost sense of the cosmic wonder and primeval anguish” (Esslin,
The Theatre of the Absurd 400).
In this respect, the Beckettian and Stoppardian plays under study tackle this theme
from various dimensions; yet, each depicts an important aspect of the hlllllllll dilemma.
Waiting for Godot presents its audience with characters whose aim is mysterious. They
wait endlessly for an unknown person. To Pozzo’s question about the identity of this
awaited Godot, both Estragon and Vladimir respond in the same way. The former asserts,
”we hardly know him;” the latter, in the same vein, comments on Estragon’s answer saying:
”True ... we don’t know him very well ... but all the same ..• ” (16). As such, neither the