The Ghosts of the Disappeared: On Re-Reading <i>Waiting for Godot</i> and <i>Aura</i> “Post”-Pandemic

Abstract Given how rapidly the still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has receded from public consciousness since 2021, time is ripe to revisit Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Carlos Fuentes’s Aura inform our present historical moment, particularly both texts are concerned with large-scale disappearance, erasure repression of mass-dead by statist economic interests in wake national traumas – post-Vichy France post-Famine Ireland case Beckett, French Intervention Spanish Conquest Mexico. Yet these two seminal works not only erase their dead, but same dead continue haunt, influence impact nations despite or even because erasure. As we once again recognizing own “post”-pandemic just have been erased, that no means signifies they silent.