There seems to be a theme throughout this play of opposite words and their meanings, which often feel closer than they appear. Take, for example, Agnes' musings on sanity and insanity, or Claire's suggestion of a crime of "passion"— love and hatred. When does sanity become insanity? When does familiarity become hatred? When does a drunk become an alcoholic? The characters are all, in one way or another, paralyzed in a middle ground in their own lives and in relation to each other. Claire especially waits for some definitive action (ie the death of her sister) to move from one stage to the next. All of the relationships are somewhat paralyzed—Agnes and Tobias seem to have a functional marriage yet Tobias has been unfaithful. Husband and wife both are stuck in a complex relationship with their daughter, who herself is in the middle of a divorce.

A common theme I noticed between the hidden spaces of this play (the dumbwaiter, the lavatory, the very basement Gus and Ben occupy) is that they are relative in their hiddenness. That is, what is hidden to Gus and Ben is not hidden to other unseen forces in the play—even the hidden spaces (and hidden knowledge) between the two partners is not equal, much the same way a kitchen is a hidden space to diners in a restaurant, but not to the cooks and waiters who make the food. Hidden spaces imply hidden knowledge (though Gus and Ben don't initially know the dumbwaiter exists, someone else certainly does) and forces of influence that operate under the radar. Ben's ultimate betrayal of Gus functions much the same way, where it initially seems that Ben and Gus occupy this basement (and by extension, the covert/hidden knowledge that comes with their job) on some equal level, but Ben indeed is bestowed with knowledge that Gus is not, creating a kind of hidden interior space between them.

I'm really interested in the repeating motif of the Rhino's sounds. At first, it seemed to have a threatening aspect, increasing in volume to build tension slowly throughout the scene. I wonder how it feels affectively for an audience when this intimidating and faceless roaring becomes art-- in music and in the faces that appear above the stage. I found this to echo the arrival of the rhino's themselves, the initial fear of the other, and the eventual acceptance of it. A similar transformation must happen in the minds of the audience, as what was once an interruption becomes music of its own, the ugly turns to the beautiful, and Berenger increasingly seems delusional for not seeing the beauty, too.

I was struck by the timing of this delightfully brief and slightly meta exchange about meaning, which follows immediately after the discussion of the apocalyptic state of the natural world outside. Thinking way back to "Greening the Absurd," I can't really seem to decide whether the characters think of nature within the environmental or ecological framework. I know you've said that Hamm and Clove's circumstance can be read as ecological: which makes sense, they are so deeply defined and subject to their natural surroundings (or subversion thereof). Their environment certainly does seem to serve as a metaphor—a reflection of Hamm + Clov's interior landscape. This reflection is a causal one: at least that's what's explicitly referenced by Hamm and implicitly understood by an audience with our own troubled reality.

The connection to nature and meaning is a pretty direct cue to look closer, because it's an association poets and artists and writers have drawn for like...ever, not necessarily in the character's reality but certainly in our own. What these few lines (and indeed, the play as a whole) achieve is to invert our own erroneous understanding of the relationship between meaning and nature, an inherently unsustainable one that returns relentlessly (either out of instinct or arrogance) to nature as the metaphor that never stops giving. Think of whole "Pastoral" genre we learned about a while ago in whatever survey class. Or the "Transcendentalist" painting movement in early America. We milk it, reduce it to an image and load up that image with all of the emotion we're incapable of just expressing outright. We exploit it (much the same way we do for resources) for meaning, reframing and reframing to our convenience (dare I say, even laziness?). Like so many screenshots of the same jpeg image, a clear and truthful image becomes corrupt.* Imagination becomes reality the same way meaning becomes causality. All of this to say we don't think of it as OUR ecosystem anymore but a tabula rasa for us to manipulate into the perfect reflection of ourselves, until we stop existing as a part of it, and it starts (or ceases) existing as a part of us. O, inadequate poetic imagination!

I just realized now I haven't gotten around to your question, bear with me. I was initially interested in this passage because Hamm does seem to share or at least be aware of our poorly-balanced causal understanding of nature. Perhaps he is so emotional because of this reversal, wherein nature gives meaning to him , and an ugly one, too.

*I realize how ironic it is that I'm using a technological metaphor here, I just didn't want to use a natural one.

I clocked this moment as one of my favorites-- a really elegant example of Beckett's ability to charge the same moment with both tragedy and comedy. In this case, the humor itself is tragedy-- Aristotle's devices of reversal, recognition, and suffering all apply here not only in the joke but in the actual telling of it. This little moment is so meta it get's a little confusing: there's (as far as I can count,) four subversions of expectations (reversals) here (1. we are reminded that waiting is indeed an inaction, 2) Hanging ourselves, obviously, seems a bit of a drastic response, 3) "erection" brings us back from a tragic remark (or is it a funny one?) to a humorous one, 4) the sudden tone shift, the absurd irrelevance of the mandrake factoid, all of which serve to highlight the contrast between the act of waiting (an inherently optimistic one) and the character's situation. All of this to say, there feels to me two "plots" going on here-- the first with Godot, and the second with Vladmir and Estragon and their dissatisfaction/unhappiness in the world they live in. I'm not sure which of these plots is simple and which is complex. maybe that's something to think about.

I love these little moments of meaning-making in the play. These "characters" are clearly interested in the author's intentions, and the consequences of the play, but the characters who have these moments are typically women (Sabina), and it's pretty poignant that this excellent little analysis comes from Ivy, a young woman of color who isn't really even in the play, when you might expect it to come from Mr. Fitzpatrick, or Mrs. and Mr. Antrobus

I found this sentiment expressed by the older Joan to be a curious one that may hint to the culture of the world these characters inhabit. Despite all of the apocalyptic sh*t clearly hitting the fan in the final scene, this line of dialogue reveals to me that the characters (perhaps as a direct condition of war) have incredibly low standards for morality (not as a personal code but a societal one) and order. In other words, in our world I'm pretty sure most employees are critical or at least wary of the way their company is run from the get-go. For these characters, though, larger overarching structural barely enters the paradigm of influenceable or direct factors. To me, what this says is that morality and ethics have lost their footing in this fictional world writ large, that they are not even a facetious belief system but rather altogether inaccessible and irrelevant. In other words, this world is a necessarily a-political one, because structural power has lost all farce of accountability or control.