Language plays a crucial role when it comes to literature, because it is used to produce the artistic literary works, and at the same time it is also used as a criterion to study the author’s style and abilities. In traditional drama, language is used in a logical order. When a character asks a question the other respond in a full, clear, and understandable sentence that answers the given question fully.
However, the Theater of the Absurd’s language sometimes loses its fixed forms and settings and even its symmetry. The main character’s use of language usually has no grammatical form that makes it difficult for the audience to understand the characters’ actions and intentions. In the following passage, the character Pozzo(the master)gave order to the other character Lucky (the slave) to show his talent of thinking to the two protagonists Vladimir and Estragon. When lucky started “thinking” no one could understand him; even the characters:
LUCKY:
Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and
Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast hell to heaven so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast and considering what is more that as a result of the labors left unfinished crowned by the Acacacacademy…………”.
Language has almost no importance in the new theater, because the language does not help the audience to have a full understanding of what is going to happen next or at least to have a logical understanding of what happened or what is going to happen, Esslin in his attempt to describe the language used in the Absurd Theater states the following:
“the dialogue tends to get out of hand so that at times the words seem to go counter to the actions of the characters on the stage, to degenerate into lists of words and phrases from a dictionary or traveler’s conversation book, or to get bogged down in endless repetitions like a phonograph record stuck in one groove”
Human beings can see the loss of importance that language is facing nowadays, and its loss might be considered as a reflection to the modern world. That much of reality now begins outside language.Large areas of meaningful experience now belong to non-verbal languages such as mathematics, formulae and logical symbolism. Others belong to “Anti-Languages‟, such as the practice of nonobjective art or atonal music. The world of the word has shrunk.”
