A Comparative Study of Narrative and Philosophical Dimensions Between the Novel “No One Writes to the Colonel” and the Play “Waiting for Godot”
Abstract
Gabriel García Márquez's novella No One Writes to the Colonel (1958) and Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot (1952), though belonging to different genres, are seminal works from the 1950s that profoundly explore the human condition of waiting in the post-World War II era. This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of these two texts to elucidate both the universal and the particular dimensions of the "waiting" motif within postwar literature. It argues that each work, through its unique generic conventions, presents a distinct response to existential uncertainty. Márquez’s social realist approach grounds the colonel's interminable wait for a pension in a specific socio-political context, portraying a struggle against systemic oblivion with tangible, human resilience. In stark contrast, Beckett’s absurdist drama employs abstraction and cyclical dialogue to deconstruct meaning itself, presenting waiting as a metaphor for the existential void. Consequently, these works articulate two pivotal modes of twentieth-century resistance: Latin American magic realism confronts absurdity with flesh-and-blood persistence, while European absurdism meets it with ironic deconstruction and metaphysical fragmentation.
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