Phenomenological Waiting as Resistance: A Schweizerian Reading of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Articles in Press

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Associate Professor, English Department, Faculty of Humanities, Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, Kerman, Iran.

2 English Department, Faculty of Humanities, Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, Kerman, Iran.

Abstract

This paper reconsiders Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead through Harold Schweizer’s phenomenology of waiting, arguing that the suspended condition inhabited by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern exceeds passivity and carries critical value when understood as lived temporality. Drawing on Schweizer’s account of durée and the Sabbath gaze, this study shows how Stoppard presents waiting as a way of inhabiting time that unsettles the teleological logic of dramatic progression, allowing delay to acquire significance through deferral. The question game brings this logic into focus by using language to prolong the characters’ shared presence. Their waiting is therefore not empty; it creates a shared temporal space that loosens the demands of the script. The full implications of this temporal suspension emerge at the end, where the recursive structure unsettles tragic closure and recasts death as an opening onto further refusal. As a result, the play treats waiting as an active mode of resistance through which time remains inhabitable, even within a predetermined narrative.

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Critical Literary Studies

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 06 August 2026

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History

  • Receive Date: 19 May 2026
  • Revise Date: 03 August 2026
  • Accept Date: 06 August 2026

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