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Significance of Lucky's speech in Waiting for Godot

Lucky's speech from SAMUEL BECKETT's Waiting for Godot, played by Alan Mandell in a production directed by Beckett himself (as part of "Beckett Directs Beckett" series). He has only a handful of dialogues in the play, none as important as this long soliloquy, even if we include dialogues of all other characters. It stands out from the terse mostly one-liners used in the text. Lucky's character is like the mythical Sisyphus personalising most directly not just the absurdity of human existence but also an acceptance of the situation. It is a classic absurdist character- a puppet-like victim of cruel fate, replete with black humour, forever anxious, having lost his sense of self-worth, estranged from his own well-being and terribly lonely. He is closest to what Beckett's idea of a modern man might have been - entangled by choice/resignation to fate with a meaningless job, carrying its burden without questioning, challenging or even thinking about his state of being. Development of Theatre of Absurd can be traced back to several movements like Commedia dell'arte, expressionism, dadaism and surrealism. Although playwrights like Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, and Harold Pinter are most definitively associated with this form of theatre, its roots go back to elements in works of Kafka, Ibsen and Strindberg, or for some even as far back as absurdist humour in ancient greek comedies. It would not be fair to see Lucky's speech as total gibberish. Although Beckett refused in his lifetime to explain his plays, he agreed that Lucky conveyed a central message of the play. The seemingly academic gibberish is his take on the useless nonsense that goes in the name of academic writings or lectures, especially in areas of theology, philosophy and even natural sciences. It ridicules high sounding terminology and names by distortion or repetition of their words (quaqua or 'labors of Fartov and Belcher'). He notes how the labours of this sophisticated erudition goes to waste (even comparing it to excreta) or is lost in the face of fatal events like WW2. The speech also rejects the notion of God, either anthropomorphic or transcendental, and seems to accept an indefinite period of waiting, with suffering as accompaniments to human existence.