Pozzo is a character from

Samuel Beckett Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish writer of novels, plays, short stories, and poems. Writing in both English and French, his literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and Tragicomedy, tra ...

's play ''

Waiting for Godot ''Waiting for Godot'' ( or ) is a 1953 play by Irish writer and playwright Samuel Beckett, in which the two main characters, Vladimir (Waiting for Godot), Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), engage in a variety of discussions and encounters w ...

''.Fletcher, J., "The Arrival of Godot" in ''The Modern Language Review'', Vol. 64, No. 1 (Jan., 1969), pp. 34–38 His name is Italian for "well" (as in "oil well"). On the surface he is a pompous, sometimes foppish,

aristocrat The aristocracy (''from Greek'' ''ἀριστοκρατία'' ''aristokratía'', "rule of the best"; ''Latin: aristocratia'') is historically associated with a "hereditary" or a "ruling" social class. In many states, the aristocracy included the ...

(he claims to live in a manor, own many slaves and a Steinway

piano A piano is a keyboard instrument that produces sound when its keys are depressed, activating an Action (music), action mechanism where hammers strike String (music), strings. Modern pianos have a row of 88 black and white keys, tuned to a c ...

), cruelly using and exploiting those around him (specifically his

slave Slavery is the ownership of a person as property, especially in regards to their labour. Slavery typically involves compulsory work, with the slave's location of work and residence dictated by the party that holds them in bondage. Enslavemen ...

, Lucky and, to a lesser extent, Estragon). He wears similar clothes to Vladimir and Estragon (i.e. a bowler and suit), but they are not in the dire condition theirs are.

''Godot'''s antagonist

While by no means a villain in a conventional sense of the word, Pozzo is sometimes considered (nominally) the "

antagonist An antagonist is a character in a story who is presented as the main enemy or rival of the protagonist and is often depicted as a villain.hero A hero (feminine: heroine) is a real person or fictional character who, in the face of danger, combats adversity through feats of ingenuity, courage, or Physical strength, strength. The original hero type of classical epics did such thin ...

es of the play (Vladimir and Estragon) he does bring chaos into their sheltered world. Upon his first entrance, he immediately goes about attempting to exert authority on the hapless "Didi" and "Gogo" by shouting at them, ordering them about, and generally making a nuisance of himself. Along the way he mercilessly abuses Lucky (physically and mentally) into performing menial and sometimes pointless tasks. However, despite his authoritative presence, he has the tendency of falling to pieces at the (literal) drop of a hat. At certain points in the first act (and for most of the second act; see below) he has minor nervous breakdowns when things don't go his way (e.g. when he misplaces things, when Vladimir and Estragon don't understand him/berate him, etc.). Pozzo should not be seen, however, as merely a mindless, weak oppressor. He has a developed

intellectual An intellectual is a person who engages in critical thinking, research, and Human self-reflection, reflection about the nature of reality, especially the nature of society and proposed solutions for its normative problems. Coming from the wor ...

side: he philosophises intelligently and optimistically.

On his blindness

Pozzo goes through a rather radical transformation between the first and second acts: he goes blind. When he makes his second (final) entrance, he almost immediately falls over and cannot get up. He remains this way for the rest of his scene, helplessly moaning and bemoaning his fate and condition. This change supposedly only occurs in the past day. Some critics interpret this as representing his failure to see the suffering in others, and thus has brought suffering upon himself.

Pozzo and Estragon

Pozzo is often compared to Estragon (just as Lucky is compared to Vladimir) as being the impulsive, right-brained part of his character duo. The idea is that Pozzo and Lucky are simply an extreme form of the relationship between Vladimir and Estragon (the hapless impulsive, and the

intellect Intellect is a faculty of the human mind that enables reasoning, abstraction, conceptualization, and judgment. It enables the discernment of truth and falsehood, as well as higher-order thinking beyond immediate perception. Intellect is dis ...

who protects him), and thus extreme forms of those very characters. He, like Estragon, has an awful memory, and since he cannot rely on Lucky for memory (as Estragon can on Vladimir), he is even more in the dark (e.g. he cannot even remember one day before). Vladimir claims that he and Estragon know him, but this is naturally not corroborated by Estragon, and the nature of their former relationship remains unknown. He occasionally comes up with poetic metaphors for the current situation, again, just as Estragon does.

References

External links

A source of various interpretations of Pozzo and Lucky
{{Beckett Samuel Beckett characters Theatre characters introduced in 1953 Fictional nobility Fictional blind characters Male characters in theatre