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 Days" (1961). These plays—which are often considered, rightly or wrongly, to have been instrumental in the so-called "Theatre of the Absurd"—deal in a darkly humorous way with themes similar to those of the roughly contemporary existentialist thinkers. The term "Theatre of the Absurd" was coined by Martin Esslin in a book of the same name; Beckett and "Godot" were centerpieces of the book. Esslin argued these plays were the fulfilment of Albert Camus's concept of "the absurd"; this is one reason Beckett is often falsely labeled as an existentialist (this is based on the assumption that Camus was an existentialist,