t least three pages, only adds to the pitiful portrayal of modern attitudes that is characteristic of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The Lead Player is the third main character. He is the opposite to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The Player believes in predeterminism and, instead of believing in chaos, he has thrown the entire theory of chaos out of the window and has decided that everything has been prewritten by, of course, the writer who has cast us all in his worldwide play. That ultimate play is completely finite and unchangeable. Everything has been written, even death. In fact, the Player's favorite thing to act is a death. He is a firm believer that death is an integral part of the play and that a play is meant to span an entire life, therefore it is not over until all those marked for death are dead. The Player's certainty that everything is predetermined leads Guildenstern to realize that he and Rosencrantz's total acceptance of chaos has led them to a disastrous end. He says to the Player in a heated argument, "I'm talking about death and you've never experienced that. And you cannot act it...But no one gets up after death there is no applause there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's Death"(Act III, pg. 96). The Player's naivety to the fact that he is in reality (or at least the reality that exists on the stage in Stoppard's play) and not in his little play of life leads him to, in fact, be much happier in his false knowledge that there is no chaos and that everything is pre-set. The knowledge that there is chaos is the root of Guildenstern's unhappiness and therefore, in Stoppard's opinion, the root of society's problem with dealing with the chaos. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Stoppard shows two ways that modern society has reacted to the knowledge that we live in constant chaos. One is to completely accept it and disregard all of the laws of probability and the other is to compl...
