Penultimate Blog

The penultimate blog of the year has finally arrived and along with it, the end of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I must say, the end of the play was quite interesting to say the least, especially the views on death that were revealed by both Ros and Guil as well as the various Tragedians. I guess it really does revisit the theme of life being like a play where each one of us gets a chance to walk across the stage and perform, whether it be improvisational or set in stone. Also the tone of the entire third act of the play kind of makes Ros and Guil sympathetic characters to a certain extent. From the very beginning of the play, we know that the final fate of the two main characters will be death because it is mentioned in the title. Despite knowing this however, I really didn’t feel any sympathy at all for the two because of the joking behavior and complete obliviousness the two showed. This only continued in the second act when they have no idea what to do with their lives unless someone tells them what to do. This is plainly evident through the fact that Claudius told the two to capture Hamlet after he killed Polonius and the two blindly do it without thinking of their friends feelings. In the third act however, things take a turn towards the more serious and more philosophical. Instead of plotting capture or some other action ordered by others, the two discuss death in what can be seen as humorous, but is likely much deeper than that. This is shown by Guildenstern’s claim that death is really nothing more than the fulfillment of an inexplicable and unavoidable fate. The fact that we all live a life that leads towards some death that is unavoidable is a concept that is recurring and is presented again near the end of the play. Our lives are like plays in which our acts have been mapped out and written in stone such that there is always someone watching and giving orders. As the end scene continues, more complicated and interesting views on death are given by both the Tragedians and the two main characters. The Player states that death is common and that light vanishes with life. Guildenstern replies that real death is not theatrical but is simply the absence of anything, the state of not existing. It is as if when a person dies, he or she just disappears in time, which is a very interesting concept in the scope of the novel because Tom Stoppard never really shows us when and how Ros and Guil die. Stoppard is holding something from us because from the very beginning, we expect Ros and Guil to die because of the title of the novel. Then when it finally comes time for their deaths, we don’t witness it and instead learn of the deaths of Claudius, Hamlet, Laertes, and Gertrude. I know this response is rather convoluted and doesn’t really have a centralized theme, but it does sufficiently express my confusion at the events that occurred at the end of the novel. Let us just hope an in class discussion can shed some light on the situation.