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
Theatre of the Absurd plots of many Absurdist plays feature characters in interdependent pairs, commonly either two males or a male and a female. Some Beckett scholars call this the "pseudocouple". The two characters may be roughly equal or have a begrudging interdependence (like Vladimir and Estragon in "Waiting for Godot" or the two main characters in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"); one character may be clearly dominant and may torture the passive character (like Pozzo and Lucky in "Waiting for Godot" or Hamm and Clov in "Endgame"); the relationship of the characters may shift dramatically throughout the play (as in Ionesco's "The Lesson"