Waiting for Godot his surveillant presence. He is by turns dismissed, satirised, or ignored, but he, and his tortured son, are never definitively discarded." "Waiting for Godot" has been described as a "metaphor for the long walk into Roussillon, when Beckett and Suzanne slept in haystacks [...] during the day and walked by night [... or] of the relationship of Beckett to Joyce." Becket told Ruby Cohn that Caspar David Friedrich's painting "Two Men Contemplating the Moon", which he saw on his journey to Germany in 1936, was a source for the play. Though the sexuality of Vladimir and Estragon is not always
Samuel Beckett described as minimalist. The extreme example of this, among his dramatic works, is the 1969 piece "Breath", which lasts for only 35 seconds and has no characters (though it was likely intended to offer ironic comment on "Oh! Calcutta!", the theatrical revue for which it served as an introductory piece). In his theatre of the late period, Beckett's characters—already few in number in the earlier plays—are whittled down to essential elements. The ironically titled "Play" (1962), for instance, consists of three characters immersed up to their necks in large funeral urns. The television drama "Eh Joe" (1963), which was written