Shadowlands And Qd Comparison

The plays Shadowlands and QED represent two different worldviews of suffering and death. Nicholson’s play shows that suffering is often underestimated, yet a divine hope awaits at the end of the storm. Parnell’s QED views suffering and death as an unexplored adventure waiting to happen. While both of these views contain both merits and flaws, the Christian worldview can be found in Shadowlands’ honesty about the nature of suffering and the hope of eternity and QED’s view that suffering and death are learning experiences. Shadowlands begins with C. S. Lewis giving a lecture on love, pain, and suffering. Lewis describes pain as “God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world” (2). Because of free will, humans can be prone to become selfish and self-sufficient. According to Lewis, God uses suffering to teach people to rely on Him and the hope of heaven. Lewis ends his lecture by saying this world is only the shadowlands, and real life has yet to begin. While this view of suffering is somewhat accurate, it is naïve to the true weight of pain; however, Nicholson’s reconciles this in Act Two. In Act Two, Lewis and his new wife Joy finds out that she is terminally ill. Although Joy attempts to keep her spirits up, …show more content…
Feynman believes that the concept of pain and death are simply unexplored and unknown territories. “So something happens you didn’t expect…. Sometimes when you’re trying to trick Nature into telling you her secrets, she ends up surprising you…and that! Suddenly that is the most interesting thing of all!” (18). As the play progresses, it becomes obvious that Feynman has a morbid curiosity for scientific reasons. Because he has never experienced death, he is eager to learn what it is like; however, it never seems to occur to him that death could lead to horrible things. In other words, Feynman sees no need for God’s salvation or heaven’s promise. Feynman’s god is physics and the endless quest to know