ABSURDISM, EXISTENTIALISM, FREE WILL, POSTMODERNISM

 After the war,

Introduction

The first world war threw society into a state of disillusionment, and a fracturing of the staunch belief in morals became prominent, sparking literary advancements that challenged romantic ideals, advocating for a new perception of stability and sensibilities. In the poem Gerontion by T.S. Elliot, the modernist stance of fragmentation and the pursuit of purpose lies in man’s actualization of himself. Meanwhile, Samuel Beckett’s waiting for Godot written in the post-war environment of World War II can be viewed as an attack on modernism, rejecting its ideological claims to legitimise purposeful meaning that interprets the world of Estragon and Vladimir with a Grand Existential Narrative . Nonetheless, both these arguments provide a post-war lens that views life without inherent importance nor singular purpose/essence, resulting in the rise of ‘absurdism’— a search for answers in a world that offers no true answer . In this essay, the aforementioned concepts will be discussed and examined, extrapolating on how the old man Gerontion and the Characters of Waiting for Godot represent different availabilities of existential freedom in the act of finding a sense of purpose and meaning.

Gerontion (1920)

First published in 1920, T. S. Eliot’s poem Gerontion contemplates how life has flowed away like a dream, which was mentioned at the start with an excerpt of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: ‘Thou hast nor youth nor age…Dreaming of both’. Gerontion is ‘read to by a boy, waiting for rain’. Here, what is read by the boy holds no importance as the old man immediately segues into the past, lamenting the lacking action and heroic conquest, being ‘neither at the hot gates’, nor ‘heaving a cutlass…fought’. The point serves to highlight his being read to by a boy, showing an old man’s life devoid of stories where nothing has happened, when he is still ‘waiting for rain’, or meaning, even at the gates of death. Gerontion also struggles to find meaning in Salvation, particularly divine intervention (Signs are taken for wonders.’ We would see a sign!’) in the cosmopolitan manifestation of Christian Faith; he envies the communion ‘to be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk’ reverently by a global diversity (Silvero, Hakagawa, Madame de Tornquist, Fräulein von Kulp etc), and longs for the Faith and meaning felt by followers ‘who walked all night in the next room’ likely as a testament of devotion in this context. Unfortunately, Gerontion is ‘swaddled with darkness’ and judged by ‘Christ the tiger’, unable to reconcile himself with religion’s promise of an ultimate meaning despite seeing its meaning in the lives of others. He dismisses potential meaning in legacy, ‘whispering ambitions’ in the march of history and its ‘contrived corridors’, and interpersonal relationships that would ‘be adulterated’, leaving him out of control in such a position of loneliness and misery. Gerontion doggedly pursues truth, but is met with dead ends.

From the above, Gerontion’s separation from accepted meanings in the world is clearly observed and can be an example of free will’s volatility as seen in Eliot’s philosophies. As a Christian existentialist, Elliot claims that life is action, not vain speculations; man should recognize freedom, identify conscience, and have discipline of the soul (Boran 2018). Similarly, existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre asserts that by looking for convenient presets of answers equals to refuting the absurd, which is a practice of ‘bad faith’— a pretence that adopted morals have intrinsic meaning, a contradiction of meaning acquired out of convenience. Partly influenced by the pioneer of existentialism—Søren Kierkegaard’s perspective stating that God provides humans with free-will that is non-teleological, Sartre concludes that man is condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does. Since the idea of a preceding essence is not accepted, and because Gerontion finds no point in the conventional meanings of life, he surrenders as an old man waiting for death, the only true sense of resolution. Hence, the poem as described by Russell Kirk, is "a description of life devoid of faith, drearily parched, it is cautionary" (Kirk 2008). From the perspective that Man first exists, then only crafts his individual essence (Sartre 1947), Gerontion’s plight of finding nothing in his dissection of the established meanings of life shows a struggle to reconcile with the absurd.

The poem begins with “an old man in a dry month” and, after examining different meanings of life, ends with “a dry brain in a dry season,” as if the fertile rains for a sprouting of purpose were fated to miss him. The existentialist lens is pushed to the domain of nihilism as Gerontion becomes aware of his failure in adopting a multiplicity of perspectives in order to grasp all the dimensions of possible meaning with the limited resources he has (Boran 2018). Unfortunately, it is also due to such limitations that prevents Gerontion from finding essence at all, effectively binding him away from truth in freedom and freedom in truth; in which ‘We have not reached conclusion, when I/ Stiffen in a rented house’ could allude to his body expiring. Although Gerontion goes over how each of the pillars of meaning influences those who live according to them, he does not find true peace nor meaning in shaping his purpose, and so he finds nothing in everything. This ties into how the poem can be about exploring action and inaction and their consequences (sigg 1989), but it's too late, too hard to contemplate and find meaning as an old man so near to death, so he waits in ‘a decayed house’ romanticising death to claim him. 

Waiting for Godot (1949)

To date, critical commentary has deduced in Waiting for Godot elements of the absurdist movement observing that the limited (mental and/or philosophical) capacities of humans make it impossible to grasp the existence of inherent meaning, if there is one. As visually depicted throughout the play, Estragon is much too constrained with physical needs (to sleep, to crave food, to relieve pain, and to dream of comfort) to worry about the waiting. On the other hand, Vladimir's distraction of pain is primarily mental anguish, which would account for his voluntary exchange of his hat for Lucky's, signifying a symbolic desire for another person's thoughts (Gluck 1979). Furthermore, Estragon does not remember at all if they had been waiting in the past, and Vladimir does not fare much better. In fact, none of the characters can clearly remember occurrences of each day throughout the entirety of the play; when Estragon and Vladimir fail to recognize Pozzo and when the boy claims to have never met Vladimir. There is no chance for a truer version of self-crafted essence/purpose when they are bound to extremely limiting circumstantial measures, both micro (bodily representation of mental/physical pain) and macro (the recurring wait for Godot, and the curious nature of their collective amnesia). Even when Estragon reassures himself by saying ‘We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?’, the fact remains that they are all still caged with equal incomprehension of the totality of free will (which, in this case, is defined by a lack of capability to choose due to the combined constraints of a broken sense of time), and their being bound to wait in a fixed space by the tree. Thus, these restrictions dooms them to the absolute absurdity of existence with an lack of intrinsic purpose out of their control (Ball and McConachie 2010).

From the title of the play itself, it is discerned through a deterministic lens (Franklin T&C) that the ultimate purpose of Didi and Gogo is to wait for Godot. This idea defeats the concept of free will for the characters in the traditional sense, and the ultimate meaning constructed for them also means that they are morally obligated to follow it. There is the existential angst of absurdity thoroughly felt by the characters because there is no superior knowledge present, no God nor meaning to defer responsibility to. So, while it is clear that Waiting for Godot shares the existential spirit as presented by Sartre, we should accept that the play itself is not existentialist because it does not have hope, in the sense where there is no radical freedom nor purpose to craft meaningful essence when they cannot escape the environment (of waiting) that has crippled their capability to act in true accountability to free will. For example, there is no death that awaits (as it does in Gerontion), and the play ends exactly as it began, with the characters saying ‘Yes, Let’s go’ without actually doing so in both acts. In the play, nothing else matters in comparison to the Wait, and the purpose of the wait reduces the weight of personal meaning into nothingness, especially when there is no end in sight for their waiting. Consequently, with their singular purpose set in place, the characters we see would not be dissimilar to tools, waiting for their turn to be used. In effect, they are in an underprivileged position as characters that are stuck in their environment, without a remote chance to gain traction in the direction of free will. 

Drawing from the previous line of thought, we see that though Didi and Gogo are stuck in a loop of waiting, they seem to peripherally recognize the misery in the meaninglessness of their existence devoid of free will in the wait as when Vladimir had a soliloquy questioning how much truth there were in the recurrences while lamenting their doom to wallow in the rut of habit, which in itself becomes ‘a great deadener’ to their lamentations (p58). Understandably, they resort to desperate attempts at filling the void of time passing with an amalgamation of verbiage and actions; by asking Lucky to speak, by telling stories, by arguing (‘let’s contradict each other’)(p41), by ‘turn(ing) resolutely towards Nature’, and even by contemplation of suicide. As Estragon notes, they ritually pass the time so that they ‘won’t think’; they painfully distract themselves from the terror of their lack of control. This reinforces the postmodern form of absurdism seen in Vladimir's frustrated concern for unanimous truth in the Gospels, in the episode of the two thieves (p9) and also the closing words and action in the play. This process of deconstruction (a term first used by French philosopher Jacques Derrida) of a coherent world picture is described by Lodge's modes of alternative composition known as contradiction and permutation (Cerrato 1993). As mentioned by Estragon, they spend their time ‘blathering about nothing in particular’ and ‘that's been going on now for half a century’(pg105). Accordingly, all their contemplation of life’s meanings were just a medium to pass the time with no sense of apparent growth nor change (considering their age), reinforcing a lack of adherence to meaning. 

Is Godot not as free as Gerontion? 

philosopher Patricia Churchland posits that the wide range of internal and external causes are intertwined which results in what we call ‘more or less free’ (Shea). That said, the characters in waiting for Godot are bound by external factors such as repetition and timelessness, in conjunction to the fixed reactions of their own characters bound to wait. This is why Didi and Gogo struggle to comprehend true meaning in the wait, and are too preoccupied with their own looping of troubles, making them less aware of the weight of concepts compared to the ruminations of the more existentialist Gerontion who struggles to find meaning but recognises free will for choice to engage in meaning. On the other hand, though it can be argued that Gerontion ultimately holds more freedom, the scope of control (both internal and external) does not seem so different from the characters in Waiting for Godot. there are different factors (such as old age, poor health) limiting the control of purpose and essence in the philosophical sense. In parallel to Beckett’s play, the thoughts in Gerontion’s mind that flit by different phases of life’s meaning helps to pass the time waiting for death. The chosen perspective for Gerontion would be considerably bleaker than the wait for Godot as there is a sure existential-nihilistic sense of resentment and surrender of the failed meanings of life in the wait for death. This, coupled with the tone of awareness and regret Gerontion has for doing absolutely nothing in life (xx) can be viewed as heavier in contrast to the ignorance and forgetfulness that persists almost as a seed of hope in the waiting for Godot. 

From the section above, we see that though Vladimir and Estragon are temperamentally opposite, they are both essential to each other, demonstrated in (1) the way Vladimir's metaphysical musings were balanced by Estragon's physical demands during the wait and (2) how both of them provide the last traces of hope via interaction; proving one’s existence to each other to give their world a more concrete sense (Bianchini 2015). Consequently, while company does not permanently resolve the problems met, it does make the singular doom of waiting more bearable compared to Gerontion, who is truly alone and unable to distract himself from thoughts and/or suffering.

Regardless, we should keep in mind that the play does not show humans controlling time nor freely shaping destiny the way an existentialist does. Contrarywise, it is a loss of all purposes and explanations to life. It shows humans enduring time and what we’re like when we have  nothing left but time. ;I can’t go on like this’, says Estragon. ‘That’s what you think’, says Vladimir. As most of Beckett's work deals with the impossibility; that is recognising the ultimate failure of human creation in an unreadable world of unattainable sense, the play is inextricably linked to postmodernism and possibly beyond, for it is still maintaining a struggle to "Try again. Fail again. Fail better." (Hisgen & Van der Weel 1997; White 2009). Hence, the only fragment of hope in Waiting for Godot is the stoic endurance of suffering, and to continue failing without answers

Conclusion

Childs argues that Gerontion contemplates the "paradoxical recovery of freedom through slavery and grace through sin", leading to the idea that possessing free will is a catalyst for regrets and ‘sin’. When one makes a choice with the perception that we are free, there is a significant probability for failure and regret in store, stemming from our inherently flawed nature as seen in Gerontion’s fruitless search for answers (oppoturnity and regret, Søren Kierkegaard). The more aware of the freedom the characters hold, the more responsibility they hold for their lives and their actions, which also contributes to more awareness of suffering. From the arguments discussed, it is apparent that while the deterministic nature of the universe prevents the true manifestation of free will, we can still view the very existence of life in the characters as a mode of control to craft essence stemming from the subjective feeling of freedom. 

These arguments provide a lens that views life with no inherent importance nor purpose, resulting in the rise of ‘absurdism’ (search for answers in a world that offers no true answer)---Everyone is born with a God-shaped hole (Nietzche), but there is no true comfort in God to fill it with a sense of purpose… 

The idea of possessing free will is a catalyst for regrets. When one makes a choice with the perception that we are free, there is a high probability for failure and regret in store for the human, who is inherently flawed in nature (oppoturnity and regret, Søren Kierkegaard). As seen in Gerontion.

challenging ESSENTIALISM: we are imbued with essence/purpose. (to propagate, to fulfil hierarchy of needs, to pass on knowledge for future generations of the gene etc)

Carl Rogers: we will always strive towards our fullest potential but we will never get there. 

(Albert Camus): Absurdist: The literal meaning of life is whatever you’re doing that prevents you from killing yourself. 

in his famous phrase. Life is a series of choice points, and at each choice point, you could have chosen differently than you did.’ (Baumeister, 2008).

Argument

The Characters in (Waiting for Godot) and the old man Gerontion represent the different availabilities of free will in pursuing a purpose and meaning to life.

Background: Literature review, POV of other critics

historical, social and cultural

T.S. Elliot: Modernist poet. For T.S. Eliot, man’s actualization of himself and living for greater values but not for small values are important for the philosophy of life. According to T.S. Eliot, man has an apriori. Man has to know himself and form a point of view of him so that he can realize other points of view. For him, life is action not vain speculations. Eliot was a Christian existentialist. Eliot claimed that there were three levels of existence; the first is the esthetic level of existence, the second is the ethical level of existence, the third is the authentic level of existence. In the first level, man knows himself in order to love; the aim is ‘love’ not ‘lust’. In the second level, man should love other people. In the third level, man should have a freedom of will. Man has to identify his conscience, and have a discipline of soul (pp. VII-X). (Boran 2018)

S. Beckett: Though Godot famous for being a representative of absurdist literature-Postmodern. e. Most of Beckett's work deals with this impossibility, though it is nevertheless framed by a compulsion to say, and to look for meanings. "Try again. Fail again. Fail better." (Hisgen & Van der Weel 1997)

It is mainly this aesthetics of failure. It is mainly this aesthetics of failure that links him to postmodernism, and also surpasses it, paradoxically. (Cerrato 1993)

Similarity: 

tying into postwar environment. En attendant Godot 

Differences: 

Didi and Gogo struggles to comprehend true meaning in the wait, preoccupied with their own looping of troubles, they are less aware of the weight of concepts compared to the ruminations of Gerontion, who is near death. This is because while Gerontion struggles to find meaning, he recognises the choices one can make and could have had free will to engage in meaning, but dry and near death. 

Waiting for Godot: 1949 

meaninglessness, life is absurd.  

---to accept that it is not an existentialist play: essence does not provide purpose: the (cognitive + physical) -------they cannot escape the environment (of waiting) that has crippled their capability to act in true accountability to free will. They want to move but cannot. Explicitly placed in the diction of the play: when they say “Yes, Let’s go.”, they don’t go.

---the purpose of waiting for what seems like an eternity, resorted in desperate attempts to pass the time, (asking Lucky to speak, banter, telling stories, even suicide, not serious in the utterances, they’re just voiced to pass the time!) On a more ominous tone, as Estragon notes, they pass the time so that they won’t think (pg 96).

Drawing from the previous line of thought, we see that though didi and gogo are stuck in a loop of waiting, they seem to peripherally recognize the misery in the meaninglessness of their existence devoid of free will in the wait. So, they painfully distract themselves from the terror of their lack of control by browsing through different sources of meaning like arguing (‘let’s contradict each other’)(pg96) ‘turn(ing) resolutely towards Nature’, religion and death. This ties into the postmodern form of absurdism seen in the closing words and action in Godot, Vladimir's frustrated concern for unanimous truth in the Gospel; Vladimir's frustrated concern for unanimous truth in the Gospels, in the episode of the two thieves (Cerrato 1993). This process of deconstruction of a coherent world picture is described by Lodge's modes of alternative composition known as contradiction and permutation. As mentioned by Estragon, they spend their time ‘blathering about nothing in particular’ and ‘that's been going on now for half a century’(pg105). Thus, all their contemplation of life’s meanings were just a medium to pass the time with no sense of apparent growth nor change (considering their age), reinforcing a lack of adherence to meaning, as with free will. 

From the title of the play itself (Waiting for Godot), it is discerned through a deterministic lens (xxx) that the ultimate purpose of Didi and Gogo is to wait for Godot. This idea itself defeats the concept of free will for the characters in the traditional sense, and the ultimate meaning constructed for them also means that they are morally obligated to follow it. There is no death that awaits, as it does in Gerontion, and the play ends exactly as it began, with the characters saying ‘Yes, Let’s go’ in both acts. In the play, nothing else matters in comparison to the Wait, and the purpose of the wait reduces the weight of personal meaning into nothingness, especially when there is no end in sight for their waiting. Thus, with their singular purpose set in place, the characters we see would not be dissimilar to tools, waiting for their turn to be used. In effect, they are in an underprivileged position as characters that are stuck in their environment, without a remote chance to gain traction in the direction of free will.

Estragon constantly is much too constrained with physical needs (sleep, food, pain, comfort) to worry about/question the waiting.

Mesnwhile, "Vladimir's distraction of pain is primarily mental anguish, which would thus account for his voluntary exchange of his hat for Lucky's, thus signifying Vladimir's symbolic desire for another person's thoughts." These characterizations, for some, represented the act of thinking or mental state (Vladimir) and physical things or the body (Estragon).

 Gluck, Barbara (1979). Beckett and Joyce: Friendship and Fiction. London: Bucknell University Press. p. 152.

This is visually depicted by Vladimir's continuous attention to his hat and Estragon to his boots. While the two characters are temperamentally opposite, with their differing responses to a situation, they are both essential as demonstrated in the way Vladimir's metaphysical musings were balanced by Estragon's physical demands.

Bianchini, Natka (2015). Samuel Beckett's Theatre in America: The Legacy of Alan Schneider as Beckett's American Director. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 29.

Though both of them do not permanently resolve the problems met, it makes the waiting more bearable, as the singular purpose is to pass the time onstage. Estragon does not remember at all if they had been there waiting before, and Vladimir isn’t much better. In fact, none of the characters in the play remember meeting each other, nor the fact that they have been present on the first day. (pg 19 Estragon to Pozzo, Boy to Vladimir) There is no chance for a true version of self-crafted essence when they are bound to extremely limiting circumstantial measures, both internal (mental and physical representation of pain) and external (the recurring wait for Godot, and the curious nature of their collective amnesia). Granted, one can argue that there are different restrictions/angles of free will experienced by didi, gogo, Pozzo and Lucky, but the fact remains that they are still both caged, with equal incomprehension of the totality of free will, which, in this case, is defined by a lack of capability to choose due to the combined constraints of a broken sense of time and their being bound to wait in a fixed space (the tree). 

Martin Esslin, in his The Theatre of the Absurd (1960), argued that Waiting for Godot was part of a broader literary movement that he called the Theatre of the Absurd, a form of theatre that stemmed from the absurdist philosophy of Albert Camus. Absurdism itself is a branch of the traditional assertions of existentialism, pioneered by Søren Kierkegaard, and posits that, while inherent meaning might very well exist in the universe, human beings are incapable of finding it due to some form of mental or philosophical limitation. Thus, humanity is doomed to be faced with the Absurd, or the absolute absurdity of the existence in lack of intrinsic purpose.

 Ball, J. A. and McConachie, B. "Theatre Histories: An Introduction." (New York: Routledge, 2010.) P. 589.

T.S. Elliot’s Gerontion: 1920

first published in 1920, Gerontion is a poem by T. S. Eliot that begins with “an old man in a dry month” and ends with “a dry brain in a dry season,” as if the fertile rains that would have brought a sprout of faith have passed him by, leaving him spiritually shattered upon the shore of history O’Reilly (2012)

finding no meaning to the 4 conventional meanings of life. An old, old man without purpose, only waiting for death, the only true sense of resolution.  

The last stanza of ‘Gerontion’ is only two lines long. It reminds the reader of the “dry season” and refers to all these thoughts as coming from a “dry brain”. The speaker’s separation from the contemporary world, specifically present trends in politics, religion, and social life, is quite clear. 

-- existentialist (but points to the lack of essence)? Goes over how each of the pillars of meaning influences those who live according to them, but ---the author does not find true peace nor meaning in shaping his purpose, so he continues:

---he's finding nothing in everything. Exploring action and inaction and their consequences (sigg 1989) But it's too late too hard to contemplate and find meaning as an old man so near to death, so he's just waiting for death to come. Waiting in a drafty house, for death. 

Gerontion is aware of his failure in adopting a multiplicity of points of view in order to grasp all the dimensions. Gerontion, as we can infer from these lines, is surrounded by darkness and cannot see the truth. (Boran 2018)

TONE: Hope is not there. (talks about heavy topics too, but no jest. tired.)

Privileged: can in fact utilise free will but does not, or maybe stuck in own mental reality? 

The idea of a preceding essence is not accepted. 

Gerontion knows the story o f Christ but is not struck down by such knowledge: 'After such knowledge, what forgiveness?' (CPP, 38). 1 8 The 'knowledge' is in each case different, but the implied question is the same: what is the knowledge that saves?

Russell Kirk believes that the poem is "a description of life devoid of faith, drearily parched, it is cautionary". (Kirk, Russell. Eliot and His Age. Wilmington: ISA Books, 2008.)

To Donald J. Childs, the poem attempts to present the theme of Christianity from the viewpoint of the modernist individual with various references to the Incarnation and salvation. Childs believes that the poem moves from Christmas Day in line 19 ("in the Juvescence of the year") to the Crucifixion in line 21 as it speaks of "depraved May" and "flowering Judas". He argues that Gerontion contemplates the "paradoxical recovery of freedom through slavery and grace through sin".

(Childs, Donald J. T. S. Eliot: Mystic, Son, and Lover. Continuum International Publishing Group (1997) p. 93)

Why Godot not as free as Gerontion? X2

Contemporary Canadian American philosopher Patricia Churchland : The wide range of internal and external causes are intertwined which results in what we call ‘more or less free’. Meanwhile, Didi Gogo is bound by external factors (repetition, timelessness, in conjunction to the fixed reactions of their own characters; to wait) Thus, we can’t really blame them for the lack of resolution or for ‘wasting time in the wait’, because how much freedom do they actually have?

On the other hand, though it can be argued that Gerontion ultimately holds more freedom 

in Gerontion, the scope of control (both internal and external) does not seem so different from Godot. there are different factors (such as old age, poor health) limiting the control of purpose and essence in the philosophical sense. Gerontion is, in fact, waiting for death. In parallel to Beckett’s play, the thoughts in Gerontion’s mind that flit by different phases of life’s meaning helps to pass the time. The chosen perspective for Gerontion would be considerably bleaker than the wait for Godot as there is a sure existential-nihilistic sense of resentment and surrender of the failed meanings of life in the wait for death. This, coupled with the tone of awareness and regret Gerontion has for doing absolutely nothing in life (xx) can be viewed as heavier in contrast to the (possibly wilful) ignorance and forgetfulness that persists almost as a seed of hope in the waiting for Godot. 

The more aware of the freedom the characters hold, the more responsibility they hold for their lives and their actions, which also contributes to more awareness of suffering. From the arguments discussed, it is apparent that while the deterministic nature of the universe prevents the true manifestation of free will, we can still view the very existence of life in the characters as a mode of control to craft essence stemming from the subjective feeling of freedom. 

NOTES: 

-Primary reference. for more important pts with hard evidence. (accurate right quotations)- with good commentary, description and analysis to break down and materialise the idea

-Organise by theme: 

-Hypothesis + conclusion: Specific, clarified e.g. free will more available in Gerontion/ seems to be more available, but possibly not available at all----

T. S. Eliot: Mystic, Son and Lover

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/supplement.html

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/ O'Connor, Timothy and Christopher Franklin, "Free Will", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/freewill/>.

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1207236.pdf

Sigg, Eric Whitman. The American T. S. EliotCambridge University Press (1989) p. 171

Cerrato, L. (1993). ‘POSTMODERNISM AND BECKETT'S AESTHETICS OF FAILURE’, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui 2: 21-30. 

Boran, G. (2018). ‘An Analysis of Gerontion by T.S. Eliot’, International Journal of Curriculum and Instruction 10(1): 48-60.

Hisgen, R., & Van der Weel, A. (1997). WORSENING IN "WORSTWARD HO": A Brief Look at the Genesis of the Text. Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd'hui, 6, 243-251.

(Jean-Paul Sartre 1974) J.P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness)

https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/55998/what-is-limited-free-will