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.