R&G act 3

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead and without any answers.
"Dying is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more... the endless time of never coming back... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound..." (124).
The motif of the wind found as they examined their coming into existence is found again as they examine their leaving of existence. Wind must come from a direction. The first time they mention wind is the "wind of a windless day". The last time they mention it the wind "makes no sound". In the beginning they cannot find any direction and at the end they believe there is some sort of direction but it is unknown to them. Although they play around with all possible meanings for their lives I believe Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are at the mercy of the apathetic author who wrote them into existence. They are mere actors in his play, nothing else.
I think its interesting that as Guildenstern realizes that his time is up he remarks that "we'll know better next time." (126). This metafiction seems to me a reminder that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are different from real people because they are characters. As characters they come to life every time someone reads their story... so in a way Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are as eternal as people make them. They are actors. They exist as long as there is an audience watching.

what is a winner?

What is a winner?
According to dictionary.com a winner is "a person or thing that wins; victor." Our local narrative's authority says it- a winner is a thing, like toast.
What are we? we are beings -"living things".
So if a winner is a thing and we are things, in the spirit of elementary school optimism-
WE ARE ALL WINNERS!
... or
since everything is a winner, winner no longer has any meaning at all. A winner is a word we created to enhance our existence. It makes us feel good and gives us purpose. No one really wins no one loses we just exist, we just try to play the game as long as we can. We make up rules to reduce the chaos.

As truth is relative, I choose to go with the first option- we are all winners. Our rules never stated what a winner was or that there could only be one winner.

R&G Act 2

Rosencrantz randomly brings up the idea of death and how it is like lying in a box. He plays with the irony of being dead but having the ability to know you are dead and in a box. Death is a heavy thing to deal with especially if you believe that death is the ceasing of existence. We don't know what it is like to not exist, having no thoughts, no feeling, nothing around us but the box. This is why Stoppard talks about death in a humorous way. It's too hard to contemplate being in utter nothingness for eternity. It would be much better to know that you were in something, even a box, with the hope of entering into something more meaningful than to have no awareness of anything. Fortunately, as a Christian I don't have to try so hard to wrap my understanding around the concept of not existing because I know that death is just the beginning of a greater existence.