Pozzo (Waiting for Godot) Pozzo (Waiting for Godot) Pozzo is a character from Samuel Beckett's play "Waiting for Godot". His name is Italian for "well" (as in "oil well"). On the surface he is a pompous, sometimes foppish, aristocrat (he claims to live in a manor, own many slaves and a Steinway piano), cruelly using and exploiting those around him (specifically his slave, 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. While by no means a villain in a conventional sense of
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,