The Pairs

Abstract

The inseparable, ill-assorted but mutually dependent couple is a favourite subject with Beckett. Vladimir and Estragon had predecessors in the early novel, Mercier et Camier (written in 1946, two years before Godot, though not published till 1970). Mercier and Camier are contrasted, complementary and at times it seems interchangeable beings, a ‘pseudocouple’, to use Beckett’s own word. Their narrator comments drily at one point: ‘Mercier, up to now, had shown himself the live wire, Camier the dead weight. The reverse was to be expected at any moment’. Reversals of a similar kind occur between Vladimir and Estragon. They are contrasted, and sometimes switched, in the age-old style of comic turns that draw fun from physical disparities: Stan Laurel, cadaverously lean, Oliver Hardy short and fat, for instance, making up the familiar, inseparable image we think of as Laurel and Hardy.