Waiting for Godot Pozzo Quotes

Again, the notion of keeping track of time is portrayed as absurd, so we might just as easily call Vladimir "eleven" as "seventy." When Estragon characterizes him as "eleven" and Pozzo responds that he is "impertinent," he is simply exchanging one adjective for another. Think of it as you saying, "Hi, I’m Jen," and someone replying, "Hi, I’m hungry." Or, interpreted differently, you’ve got another neat structuring thing going on here, where Pozzo’s two lines, "You are severe" and "I am impertinent" surround the conversation about numbers; Pozzo asks Vladimir’s age and then entirely ignores the answer he gets in return.

Pozzo at first claims that time has essentially changed nothing at all as far as the world and its functions. But no sooner are the words out of his mouth that he sees a fallacy in his statement; population, after all, has increased, which means time does in fact bring change. Pozzo’s relationship with time and his attempts to understand it are important to his character; check out Pozzo’s character analysis for more.

Pozzo is the one character to have a watch, and in fact it is quite a watch. He uses it to speak not of minutes or hours, but a span of years, an impressive feat in a world where the men must examine the sky at length to determine whether or not night has come.