Godot's character is often thought to refer to God, how and why does it cause a change in the play's title and subject to Waiting for Godot?His...

To read Beckett's Godot as God and Kafka's Dog as God, I think, is an exercise in symbolist heresy. Most of the 20th century literture, especially the literature of its second half, militates against the symbolic and redefines the symbol as surface, as a literal object-state, a movement which sees its culmination in the postmodernist idea of the symbol as simulation. One must remember the addenda in Beckett's Watt--"No symbols where none intended".

The word-play of Godot is an enticement, better put a seduction of the symbolic. As Beckett said, if he had God in mind, he would have written God, but he does not. It is this similarity between God and Godot on the level of the signifier that implies their difference. The Z is almost the S, but not quite and this slippage is crucial. Symbolic meanings, especially those of a religious order (The Cross-shapes, The Fall, Augustinian and Biblical echoes, the theme damnation and redemption and so on) are inserted into the text deliberately to create a religious paradigm of interpretation and thus a fixing of the possibilities of the text, which is a paradoxic authorial intent on Beckett's part. Can we not see Godot as a real-point of pure loss and absence that lies beyond all the symbolic layers of language and all the imaginary shapes of interpretation?