Waiting for Godot: Genre 1 key example

The conversations and pursuits of Vladimir and Estragon make the audience both feel amused and uneasy. Beckett achieves a fine balance between these emotional reactions throughout the play. Only occasionally do moments in the play feel purely haunting or purely entertaining. 

Waiting for Godot belongs to the theater of the absurd, a designation typically used to describe European plays written between the end of World War II and the 1960s. Plays that belong to the theater of the absurd explore existential themes through the mode of absurdism. Often, these plays have a cyclical, repetitive structure and end more or less where they begin. This structure is in line with the existential view that human life is meaningless. At the end of Waiting for Godot, the audience feels quite certain that Vladimir and Estragon will wake up the next day and wait for Godot, just as they did the last two days. Plays of the theater of the absurd are also often tragicomic.