The Continuity Of Absurdity: Existentialist Reading Of Hamlet, Waiting For Godot, And Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead

We can find strong connection and intertextuality between Hamlet, Godot, and Rosencrantz. Although the three texts were written by writers from different times spanning hundreds of years, their themes or at least one of the leitmotifs lied in the fundamental question of human existence and man’s understanding and reaction towards an absurd world. The thesis describes the continuity from Renaissance tragedy’s profound and complicated meditation on death to modernist/post-modernist tragicomedy’s existential confusion. So in this paper, I will explore the existentialist thoughts in Hamlet, Godot, and Rosencrantz, to illustrate that the three plays’ common essential concerning about absurdity are destructed and reconstructed in different times.This thesis will analyze how the paradigm shift in different times unsettle people’s mind and cause uncertainty which leads to absurdity, and how the absurdity is indicated in both theme and form of literature. Firstly, the thesis will look into the social and religious upheaval that shake Hamlet’s mind in the transition from the Middle Ages to Renaissance, and contradictory understanding of death leading to the absurdity of searching meaning in the secular life; and then the thesis will explore that the aftermath of the World Wars almost subvert people’s belief in God; the psychological trauma and the sense of loss cause people’s uncertainty of hope in the modernized world; in the end, the thesis will illustrate the sense of anxiety and despair haunted in the post-war world, and uncertainty of going beyond the absurd by resorting to literary classics in Rosencrantz.