Heads

By Kendall

If you haven’t read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, I suggest you do, because in all honesty, it is a really good book to read. In this book, a lot of events happen that also take place in the book Hamlet, but this book goes more into depth about just Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s life and their journey.

As you read throughout this book, you will notice that a lot of things they say are examples of foreshadowing. There is a scene where they come upon a play that the Tragedians were doing and this play that the people were doing was actually deciding Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s fate, but they were to oblivious to realize that anything like that was going on. As Rosencrantz and Guildenstern continue their journey, they also flip a coin multiple times and every time they flipped it the coin landed on heads. They didn’t realize that the coin was deciding their fate either because their death ties into the symbolism of their coin flipping. The play that the Tragedians did also reflect on the play in Hamlet with the events in Elsinore and The Murder of Gonzago. Rosecrantz and Guildenstern are also just really confused people because from the start to about the middle of the book they don’t even know their own names let alone the foreshadowing happening around them. Even in the play that was shown, there was nothing in there that would’ve explained why Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will be sentenced to their death, because it doesn’t show that they did anything did wrong.

I would suggest this book to anyone who would want to read a book like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. In all honesty, I didn’t think that I would actually be fascinated in this book at first, but as we went through and read it the book really caught my attention. When we first started reading, I thought it was going to just be super slow and not attention-grabbing, but it gives you a lot more knowledge of their journey and a different perspective on the story of Hamlet. There is a lot of events that happen throughout this book, some take a turn for good and some not so much. I think that this is a very enjoyable book once you grasp the characters and what they say means, you really start to engage and relate to the characters’ mindset. You, of course, would want to read Hamlet first to grasp the plot and all the characters, and the relations between all of them. Hamlet is a little harder to understand because it is not written in our language to where we can fully understand it, but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is written to where it is so much easier to get the full effect of the book. I also think that all the foreshadowing in this book is really fascinating because you don’t really know that it is foreshadowing something until that event occurs. I really think this book will take people by surprise, and I think it is a good shorter book to read and get into.