Bernard's book is organised alphabetically, according to characters' first names: Godot comes after George Smiley. There are several apocryphal stories about where Beckett got the name from. One is that he was in a town through which the Tour de France had recently passed, and came across a group of people standing expectantly on a street corner long after the cyclists had disappeared. He asked them what they were doing. 'Nous attendons Godot,' they replied, explaining that Godot was the oldest and slowest competitor in the race.

LRB | Thomas Jones : Short Cuts in a review on 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi': The Great Characters of Literature and Where They Came From by André Bernard