| Abstract | The paper examines the nature of narrative identity in Tom Stoppard’s plays Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Travesties. It analyses the multiple sources of their worlds through the postmodern theory of narration and claims that there is no text without recontextualization. It claims that Stoppard, by exaggerating its heterogenous origin of his plays, shows how trying to deduce the origin of any play will always result in failure. Further, by focusing on some key examples, it explains how Stoppard uses the structure of an anti-play to create confusion in continuity and contradictions in his characters. Furthermore, he distorts or eliminates memory, while at the same time predetermining their end, in order to guide the audience to focus on the present. Thereby imitating the concept of the perpetual present and the process of identification, which claims that identities are always in construction and never complete. Therefore, not only are the identities of Stoppard’s plays a failure, but also of his characters. His characters cease to be definite and almost become empty subjects. They are never constant and always ready to be influenced by other narratives. In making them so, he allows them to be exemplary of the postmodern idea that identities are given. Finally, by exaggerating differences he shows the heterogeneity and the contradictory nature of the real “unexaggerated” world. The paper claims that the absurdist play is a great model to realise the inability to predict the rules of a postmodern life. Since, they are constantly changing. In Stoppard’s plays, it is visible how the nature of identity is the same as the nature of a text. Since identities are always constructed through narration. Therefore, the paper claims that identities, just like texts, are necessary recontextualizations of multiple sources always depended upon the given context. Their constitution, their continuity, even their origins are always determined by the narration and the point of view of the narrator. Therefore, constantly appearing in the form of a recontextualization, never as a unique and unified text. |
