Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: Act III

The last act opens with an existential bent with the characters asking each other "Are you there?" and "Is that you?", "Yes", "How do you know?" They conclude in this opening scene that they are "still here" because they can still think and talk and feel. At the end of the scene, death is viewed as the cessation of existence; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern die when they cease to exist; they disappear; life is existing and death is not existing. I thought it was interesting how they just disappeared. I had been wondering throughout the course of the book how Stoppard would portray the deaths of his characters, and I found this way of "killing" them unexpected but suitable to the postmodernism of the play.

The concept of fate/choice also turns up in Act III (of course!) and Guildenstern says "Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current..." Here, the ideas of fate and choice are viewed together, as intertwining in the big picture whereas in the rest of the book, they were considered as individual options and alternated but not put together. Guildenstern here says that choice is encompassed in the larger scheme of fate. There is choice only within what fate has determined. Also, I think the wind is a sort-of motif, appearing here again after several previous apprearnces in the text including Hamlet's statement that "when the wind is southerly, [he] know[s] a hawk from a handsaw". Perhaps the wind is a symbol of fate, that Hamlet's sanity depended on the direction of the wind (which he had no power to change), just as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have no power to change the direction in which the wind blows their boat.

Toward the end of the play, but not yet in the end, the Player says "Life is a gamble", going along with the idea that everything is a game. However, when Guildenstern realizes that they are about to die, he says "death is not a game which will soon be over...Death is not anything...death is not...It's the absence of presence, nothing more". I interpret this to mean that, perhaps life is a game, meant to be figured out and pondered and played, but death is not. Death is just the unfinished, unresolved conclusion. The "game" meant nothing because it inevitably just disappears in the end and nothing has been figured out.

The ambiguity of winning...

Neither Heads nor Tales won.

We tend to automatically assume that such games as we played must inevitably conclude with a winner and a looser. I aver that this is a false asumption.

The game began with two teams and a set of starter-rules. Each team attempted to win points by making cleaver rules and giving good examples for THENDYWAMPS. No criteria for winning was established; in fact, there was no mention of winning.
At the end of the game the Heads had the advantage regarding points (670 to the other team's 550), but the Tales were the self-declared winners (according to the last rule they contrived). However, what does "winning" mean when the game does not define winning? There is no winning.

In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Rosencrants and Guildenstern play the game of questions against Hamlet. There are two teams, rules, and a running score. After the game, when Rosencrantz contends that Hamlet "murdered us", Guildenstern brushes his friend's reservations aside, holding to the fact that "we made some headway" and "we gained some ground".

So it is with our game. Neither score nor title matter, in fact, nothing does.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: Act II

I think a lot of the questions raised in the play about whether everything is fate or whether it is choice is very similar to our Christian struggle to understand whether what we do is done completely according to predistination and foreordination or whether we make the choice to do what we do. After last week's spiritual emphasis week, there was much decussion and debate over this very issue. I can't say that I understand everything, but I do think that God has predestined us to be his followers and that he ordains the events that occur in this world and in our lives. That is not to say that we don't have any choice. God gives us choice too, which seems like a paradox, but somehow, that is how it is. However, I might say that we do not have completely free choice. Whatever we do, our choices cannot be free in the sense that they are completely uninfluenced decisions; they may be influenced by our peers, by social norms, by circumstances and necessities, but as humans, our choices are always influenced by our inherent sin nature.

Does that make us nobody, then, if our lives are predestined? As Guildenstern says, "If we...just happened to discover...that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost" (60). Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have scripted lives; they don't really exist apart from the script. Our lives are not like that becasue we still have choice although God does plan things out. For us as Christians, we have more meaning since God has done this than we would have if we planned our own way. The Bible says "In his heart a man plans his steps, but the Lord determines his course". The things we plan ourselves are not always the best, and as flawed and finite people, we can never know for sure what is best. However God knows.

It is true that our lives have no meaning if we live apart from God. If Rosencrantz and Guildenstern lived apart from the script, they would be meaningless. Whenever they are not in the actual play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have a pseudo-existence, trying to entertain themselves in a frivolous way and trying to answer questions but in the end finding that their logic has led them in circles. Only in God and His plan can we find meaning and become Somebody. Life is real in following God and questions have answers and there is logic.

Inaugural Rhetoric

The interview of Michael Gerson by Sarah Pulliam really did cause me to think about the inaugural address more. When I heard it initially on TV, I didn't evaluate it and I simply thought it was an exciting historical moment in which our country took the ultimate step to prove that the racial stigma that had been practically integrated into our nation almost from it's very foundation, has mostly faded into the past. However, after reading the article, I find that it is true that President Obama did not take advantage of this to speak about this important occurrence. On the other hand, perhaps it is true that he purposely avoided the topic to focus on the nation as a whole, not just the progress of one people group within the greater nation. Despite President Obama's neglect or evasion or whatever-it-may-be of the topic, I did notice that the television crew did not forsake the moment; the majority of the times that members in the crowd were shown, they were mostly African American.

Another thing that the article mentioned that I did appreciate during the inauguration was the prayer of Reverend Lowery. I also thought it was a wonderful touch to have this figurehead civil rights activist there to give the benediction and to be a part of an event that he probably never dreamed would happen within his lifetime. I don't know how much he did in the movement, but perhaps the work he did in the past helped to bring about the ascension of a fellow African American to the presidency of the United States of America, and it is appropriate that he should say the blessing at the end of the ceremony.

It was interesting that Michael Gerson noted that "when George W. Bush used scriptural passages they thought it was somehow a threat to the Constitution and when Barack Obama uses them they're normal rhetorical devices". Perhaps that is because there is an unacknowledged knowledge that President Bush actually believes the scripture that he quotes and tries to live by it. I don't know very much about President Obama, and perhaps I am completely wrong, but my impression is that he only quotes it by rote and not as a part of his life's substance.

Michael Gerson further notes that "He was completely within the tradition of American inaugural speeches" in regard to religious references. My thought is that in America, where we are fighting to banish prayer from schools and exile God from the courtrooms and his name from the pledges, when it finally comes down to the "important" things like inaugurations, God is an integral part of our tradition and we are afraid to do things without including him. This applies to Obama's religious references, the prayers at the beginning and the end, and the oath of office itself. Perhaps this is a good thing that God is still a part of our important political rituals, and then again it is bad that God has been relegated to just an ancient tradition that must not be neglected.

Michael Gerson's opinion in summary was that the Obama inaugural address was "rhetorically flat". As I listened to it while it was being given, I felt that it was a solid speech, but not extraordinary. When I skimmed over the transcript just now before writing this, I felt a little more impressed with it. Perhaps it is a speech better read than heard.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: Act I

In the first act, there is an obsession with coin tossing, probability, chance and fate. Towards the beginning, Guildenstern suggests that perhaps the law of probability have been suspended, explaining why the coin perpetually lands heads-up. I think that we speculated in class that perhaps the law of probability has been suspended because time has stopped. I would go further and reason that time has stopped. The only real time in the play is the portion that comes directly from Hamlet. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern did not really exist before the messenger summoned them. Furthermore, in between times where they are involved in the play Hamlet, they are just waiting and whiling away time until time becomes “real” again. If the play was in black-and-white and in color, only the parts which are taken from Shakespeare’s Hamlet would be in color, the rest would be in black and white…or rather, different shades of gray. When Guildenstern and the Player are betting on the coin, it finally lands tails-up and immediately afterward, the play Hamlet commences…or resumes. This change signifies the resumption of time. All the while that the coin showed heads, time was suspended; now it continues. All this ties into the postmodern concept of questioning reality as well as the concept of intertextuality.

After the Hamlet characters walk off the stage and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are left alone again in their time warp (by the way, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern never exist without someone else to validate their existence since in Hamlet they never appear alone; they are supporting characters that must be supported=> postmodern emphasis on community and socially constructed identities), they become confused about their identity. This is disorder, transience, and even existentialism when Guildenstern says “The only beginning is birth and the only end is death—if you can’t count on that, what can you count on? …Your smallest action sets off another somewhere else, and is set off by it.”

Furthermore, Guildenstern comments later, “Words, words. They’re all we have to go on.” This is a very small thing to base anything off of especially when you are postmodern and words mean nothing, as demonstrated by Rosencrantz’s lines “—over my step over my head body!—I tell you it’s all stopping to a death, it’s boding to a depth, stepping to a head, it’s all heading to a dead stop—“.