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
At times this can be more daunting than it seems, looking at the list above there is not much left. 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. Our entire being falls into chaos without them. 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. Even when one searches through everything, identity, space, time, reality, and probability and cannot find a satisfying truth, there is always death to turn to. Death is completely definable: the act of not existing. So logically, if The Answer is not found in any form of existence, it must lie in death. As Guildenstern so eloquently puts it, "You can't not-be on a boat." This shows that even death will not provide relief to the questions because if one can't be sure of exactly where one exists, how can one cease to exist there?
ause the questions keep changing. Time is completely useless. Space, which is agreed upon to have three dimensions, begins to multiply and shift
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