Complementary characters and delusions : the dialogically generated absurd in Winnie-the-Pooh, Tristram Shandy, and Waiting for Godot

Abstract

What is it that makes the interactions between certain characters seem so Absurd? In this research this question is tackled through the character pairs of Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet from Winnie-the-Pooh, Uncle Toby Shandy and Corporal Trim from Tristram Shandy, and Vladimir and Estragon from Waiting for Godot, as they are analysed in their relationship with the literary Absurd. Each duo is examined not only in the context of the entire text from which they originate but in curated examples of their direct interactions and actions, most importantly through their dialogue. Instead of a qualitative approach to squaring a text in the tradition of the Absurd through, for example, the traits of humour or meaninglessness, this research proposes that it is in character relations that absurdities are both generated and brought to attention. Martin Esslin’s Theatre of the Absurd and Neil Cornwell’s The Absurd in Literature are used as encyclopedic references through which most traditionally understood facets of absurdity are explicated. It is, however, through the critical texts of Gilles Deleuze, Mikhail Bakhtin and Roman Jakobson that hitherto underexplored aspects of the literary Absurd are expanded upon in relation to character dialogue and dialogic interaction, on topics of sense and nonsense, the implications of puppet theatre, and the case of communicative/non-communicative functions. Each theorist’s work furthers the case of the generation of the absurd in the dialogues between pairs of characters that, ultimately, mistake linguistically constructed phantoms for logical entities. This phantasmic quality at the root of character misunderstandings is at the heart of this research, one which is confirmed or denied through events in the main text, such as in Winnie-the-Pooh and Tristram Shandy, or through the non-appearance of an entity, such as in Waiting for Godot. Each of the chosen canonical works explore a different era of literature and come with their own caveats, read in their relation to the absurdities of their characters. As such, these caveats, such as the presence of Christopher Robin in Winnie-the-Pooh for example, provide a commentary on the Absurd as a whole. It is the gradual movement away from the traditional characteristics of the absurd and into the techniques of Absurd literature that is the defining and most important facet of this research, allowing one to more tangibly locate and examine incongruencies as they appear on the textual, tangible level of dialogue and the character worldview that it presupposes.