Mariyam Khatun
Department of English, West Bengal State University, Barasat 700126, Kolkata, West Bengal, India.
*Corresponding author: Mariyam Khatun
Abstract
Lexical items play the role of an important component in the construction of meaning of a literary work. While semantic analysis focuses on the objective or general meaning of a text, discourse analysis emphasizes on the subjective or local meaning. On the other hand, Pragmatic focuses on what the speaker means by a particular utterance. But to understand what the writer of a text intends to convey, or what the attitude of the text is, one has to focus not only on the component of language, but also on the way the language is used. This work will an-alyze the major lexical items used in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett and in selected songs from Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore. While the words appear similar on the surface, their resonances reveal contrasting worldviews: the existential uncertainty and philosophical void of Western modernism versus the spiritual plenitude and devotional longing at the heart of Eastern mysticism. Through a comparative lexical-pragmatic analysis, the paper shows how identical linguistic units generate opposite attitudes toward divinity, human agency, and the search for meaning.
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Copyright
© 2026 by the author(s).
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not modified or adapted.
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How to cite this paper
“Godot” in Gitanjali? –An Analysis on the Lexical Semblances between Waiting for Godot and selected Songs of Gitanjali
How to cite this paper: Mariyam Khatun. (2026). “Godot” in Gitanjali? –An Analysis on the Lexical Semblances between Waiting for Godot and selected Songs of Gitanjali. Journal of Literature Advances, 3(1), 17-23.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jla.2026.06.002