Waiting for the Cake

Vladimir and Estragon, the main characters in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, spend their days waiting for a mysterious man they have never met before named Godot. They keep waiting in the same spot near a tree with the hope to finally meet this mysterious Godot, but every evening they are told by that Godot will come the next day for sure. The next day is always the same as the last. The events just repeat themselves, albeit not exactly, but they are the same basic events.

Portal fans would get the meaning of my title, but for those who do not know what Portal is, it’s a video game about a test subject who tests a gun called a Portal Gun for a company called Aperture Science. The portal gun is what the name implies: it’s a gun that shoots portals onto walls and you can pass through them. 

Your goal throughout the entire game is to use the portal gun to make portals and solve the puzzle. Once you solve one puzzle, you take an elevator to another level and solve another puzzle. This is the basis of the game. You are required to do the same task (solving puzzles) over and over again. The person, or rather thing, conducting these “tests,” as she puts it, is a sentient robot named GLaDOS. 

Meet GLaDOS:

Friendly looking isn't she? While you are solving the puzzles, GLaDOS occasionally talks to you. She talks a lot about cake at the end of testing. She promises that once you finish testing, there will be a tasty cake waiting for you. You, well actually the person you play it, never get to see the cake, so the entire time you are promised something you do not even know is true or not. In fact, throughout the game, there are hidden messages about the cake being a lie! Don’t worry, you’ll get cake at the end if you keep reading.

Here’s one of many messages about the cake being a lie:

There are two connections that can be drawn from these two seemingly different things. I mean, comparing a video game to a book? It’s unheard of! Well, maybe not that unheard of. One point of comparison is the theme of repetition. Vladimir and Estragon are constantly living out the same day over and over again. Once they finish the day, they go their separate ways and come back to the same spot again. It seems like everything resets and starts all over again. The same can be said about Portal. You finish a puzzle and get into the elevator only to start with another puzzle to solve. In both cases, it’s almost futile to keep on trying. No matter what Vladimir and Estragon did to try to escape their cycle of waiting, they just could not. In Portal, no matter how many puzzles you solved, there would always be another puzzle on the next level.

The other point to be made is an unobtainable and mysterious endpoint both Portal and Waiting for Godot’s characters are working towards. In Waiting for Godot, the unobtainable endpoint is Godot himself. Every day the messenger boy promises them that Godot would come the next day. The next day comes, but Godot still does not show up. They are left to wait another day for him. The only thing that kept them going was the hope of meeting with Godot. In Portal, even though finishing the obstacle course of puzzle and getting cake was not the main goal of the game (the goal was really to escape the testing facility), you were still promised the cake at the end. You solve puzzles in hopes of getting closer to get the cake, but you just end up doing more and more puzzles. The person promising this cake was GLaDOS. The messenger boy and GLaDOS can be viewed as the same in that light.

In conclusion, Portal and Waiting for Godot both share the themes of repetition and a mysterious and unobtainable endpoint. Both the player in Portal and Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot must keep on with their lives and keep reliving and repeating the same thing over and over again until they reach the endpoint they have been waiting for.

And here’s the cake you’ve been promised!: