The Unexpected Deaths

Too much time on your hands can be self-destructing. It happens everyday, a woman with seemingly little to do with herself is able to sit and ponder her future; she is able to take a step back and examine where she has been and what could possibly lie ahead. Chilling to some who can’t even remember what they had for breakfast this morning and more disturbing to those who are not happy with the direction they are headed. But does it really matter in the end whether or not your toast had butter or jam on it or whether the things you have done in your time made you rich? The play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard examines the universal truth of the end of your days and the notion that what is in between really won’t count when it is all over.

Guildenstern, the more seemingly wiser of the duo, makes a comment in the first act to Rosencrantz, saying, “The only beginning is birth and the only end is death- if you can’t count on that, what can you count on?” (39). With this said, don’t you think that our two characters would do all they can to try and change the fate before them, to try to defy the laws of finality and probability, just as it happened in the flipping of the coins? However, it does not seem that these two men are capable of such higher thought. And, as said in class, the script has already been written, so wouldn’t any change you feel you were making already be in the script?

However, in this play, whether you want to call it a tragic comedy or a comic tragedy, two men have basically seen the fate of all man and know that the end will come. There is nothing anyone can do about it. Moving along in the play though, they seem more and more naïve to the fact that they too will come to an end. They have refused to see deeper into the play acted out before them, the story that tells of their ending.

What does bring depth to these characters is the fact that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do try to make sense of their existence and go through the play blissfully unaware of where it will all end. Ironic as that may sound, especially since Guildenstern did make a point to say that birth and death are the two things in life you can count on, the two men seem to think that just as the coin ended up on heads for ninety times, they too will defy the odds.