Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.

The speaker weighs a bleak, reduced form of existence (“life in a box”) against the finality of death, arriving at a grimly comic consolation: mere consciousness still permits hope, reflection, and the possibility—however small—of change. The line captures a characteristically Stoppardian tension between existential despair and rational argument, using plain, almost chatty phrasing to expose how people bargain with meaning under extreme constraint. It also suggests that survival can become a kind of minimal victory: even when agency is stripped away, the mind continues to narrate, compare, and cling to the fact of being alive. The humor (“I expect”) sharpens the tragedy rather than softening it.