“Some questions remain long after their owners have died. Lingering like ghosts. Looking for the answers they never found in life.”
This quotation explains the premise of the play. Heisenberg and the Bohrs are being haunted in their deaths by questions which were never satisfied in life. These lingering doubts are so important that they are prohibiting whatever the next step is for their ghosts after dying.
“Yes, and you’ve never been able to understand the suggestiveness of paradox and contradiction. That’s your problem. You live and breathe paradox and contradiction, but you can no more see the beauty of them than the fish can see the beauty of the water."
Frayn based most of the dialogue upon actual quoted words of the historical figures in question so as to capture their imaginations as accurately as possible. In this way readers can see Bohr's frustration with Heisenberg's naive youth come through. Considering himself Heisenberg's mentor, Bohr cannot stand to be surpassed. He knows that he has the superior mind developed through far greater experience.
“We have one set of obligations to the world in general, and we have other sets, never to be reconciled, to our fellow-country men, to our neighbors, to our friends, to our family to our children. We have to go through not two slits at the same time but twenty-two. All we can do is to look afterwards, and see what happened.”
The characters are haunted by a discussion of responsibility, or obligation as here stated. They cannot find peace because they each believe that they are unwillingly responsible for the development of the atomic bomb and all its genocidal implications for mankind. In an attempt to mitigate their feelings of guilt they rationalize the measure of actual responsibility which one bears in any given sphere of life. They're looking for perfect clarity of perspective, object clarity if you will.
“Bohr: Before we can lay our hands on anything, our life’s over.
Heisenberg: Before we can glimpse who or what we are, we’re gone and laid to dust.
Bohr: Settled among all the dust we raised.
Margrethe: And sooner or later there will come a time when all our children are laid to dust, and all our children’s children.”
While dramatic, this quotation demonstrates the strongly experimental bent of the text. Characters finish each others sentences and drift in and out of conversations with themselves and others. Amid the confusion of the setting -- death, -- the protagonists are attempting to communicate the complex and despairing experience of being dead. They can see their entire lives laid out before them but are unable to change anything about those events.
