I read Waiting for Godot at nineteen because a senior in the theatre society told me to, and finished it certain I'd been pranked. Two men, a tree, nothing happens, twice. He just said: read it again in ten years.
I have, more or less on schedule, and the play keeps changing without moving a word. In my twenties it was funny — music-hall funny, two clowns doing hat business at the end of the world. In my thirties it was the waiting itself, which had stopped looking like invention and started looking like documentary. Lately what I notice is that they stay. That's the whole plot, if you insist on one: two people who can't help each other in any practical way, staying anyway. I can't read the last page calmly anymore. I've stopped trying.
What took longest to see — a career in engineering helped — is the craft. Beckett is the great subtractor. Every draft removes. The late plays shrink toward a mouth in darkness, saying less. Stage directions precise to the second, because once you've cut everything optional, what's left is load-bearing. Anyone can add. Knowing what survives subtraction is the harder, rarer thing.
There's a line at the end of The Unnamable I've carried for years: you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on. It shows up on mugs now, dressed as motivation, which Beckett would have found funny. It isn't motivation. It's just the most honest sentence I know — both halves true, nothing resolved, and then the comma, and then going on anyway.