Postmodernism emerged in the last century to confront many conventions of the modernist era. Authors such as Fowles, Delillo, Pynchon, Borges and Stoppard play on the convictions of audiences and take from them what society holds most dear. In Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead two bewildered heroes are able to redefine the world they have been subjected to by questioning every certainty they come across. A broad range of standards are subjected to intense scrutiny and ultimate demolition, for example when a coin Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are flipping lands on heads for the hundredth time, the laws of probability immediately become void. Then, Identity another self-evident truth is masked by the interchangeability of the main characters’ names and personalities. The players further tear apart identity by playing with reality and taking the form of many characters at different times. After the foundation of these distinctions is demolished the rest of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s reality is reduced to rubble. The widely constant laws of physics apply only at certain times. Truth does not exist, bec
. . .
In other postmodern works the same standards are torn apart to show how untrue and false the world is, but there is at all times one supreme constant, death. Death is completely definable: the act of not existing. As Guildenstern so eloquently puts it, “You can’t not-be on a boat. People in our society base their lives around the hope that all the ideals presented are definitive and can be relied upon to explain the universe. So logically, if The Answer is not found in any form of existence, it must lie in death. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are simply not satisfied with the world they have been given, so they turn their lives into a never-ending game of question tennis. Finally, Stoppard deconstructs death, the one absolute, into obscurity.
At first glance there does not seem to be much purpose in deconstructing everything humans have been taught to believe in, except for driving senior English students to the point of insanity or enlightenment (or perhaps both). Our entire being falls into chaos without them. Sometimes the players are on the main stage and have a role to carry out, but most of the time the players wander aimlessly about backstage. Basically, any notion of reality is false. Stoppard’s proposed “religion” is similar; he presents the idea that humans are related to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in that we are all just minor characters in this play that is life. Tom Stoppard is not really presenting this as a religion, but who is to say it is any less credible than Christianity.
Approximate Word count =
758
Approximate Pages =
3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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