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 aloneness and the doomed desire to successfully connect with other human beings are expressed in several late pieces, including "Company" and "Rockaby". In the hospital and nursing home where he spent his final days, Beckett wrote his last work, the 1988 poem "What is the Word" ("Comment dire"). The poem grapples with an inability to find words to express oneself, a theme echoing Beckett's earlier work, though possibly amplified by the sickness he experienced late in life. Jack MacGowran was the first actor to do a one-man show based on the works of Beckett. He debuted "End of Day" in