Memory’s Collapse and Corporeal Decay: Trauma, Neuroscience, and Medical Humanities in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
Authors :Dr. Jayaprakash A
Abstract
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot constitutes a dramatic anatomy of memory failure as existential trauma, systematically staging the cognitive, corporeal, and temporal pathologies that contemporary neuroscience and trauma theory now document as hallmarks of traumatic stress. This interdisciplinary analysis demonstrates how Beckett's formal innovations—circular dialogue, repetitive degradation across acts, prop-mediated rituals, and bifurcated temporal structure—precisely map onto hippocampal dysfunction, somatic markers, and PTSD's characteristic temporal distortions (van der Kolk; Caruth). Drawing on Lois Gordon's psychological readings, Lawrence Graver's structural analysis of repetition, and Paul Lawley's tragicomic erosion, the paper traces memory's fragility through five axes: (1) Vladimir and Estragon's dialogic unreliability; (2) Pozzo and Lucky's corporeal decay, pathologizing Cartesian dualism; (3) waiting's cyclical temporality inverting linear progression; (4) trauma theory/ neuroscience convergences (Schacter's "seven sins," Caruth's "unclaimed experience"); and (5) medical humanities parallels with Korsakoff confabulation, H.M.'s anterograde amnesia, and narrative medicine's ethics of witness.
Gendered asymmetries (Estragon's somatic vs. Vladimir's cerebral fragility), postcolonial critique (Godot as absent white saviour), and disability embodiment (Lucky's crawl as "memory tax") converge with Kerala's Theyyam trance-rituals, decolonizing Beckett's minimalism into universal mnemonic diagnostics. Against therapeutic optimism, Beckett insists on incurability — literature as superior diagnostician witnessing what medicine cannot heal. Anticipating digital-age questions about AI memory prosthetics versus organic voids, Waiting for Godot founds medical humanities avant la lettre, repositioning absurdist drama as proto-clinical case study illuminating modernity's memory-afflicted condition.
Keywords: Beckett, Waiting for Godot, trauma theory, medical humanities, memory disorders, neuroscience, postcolonial memory, narrative medicine, somatic markers, Theyyam
