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Hamlet And His Life
Hamlet is a man with a lot of goals to meet, but he overthinks everything too much. Every chance he gets to pursue his goal, he overthinks it causing him to not be able to act accordingly. Hamlet contemplates killing himself but finds himself unable to. Hamlet proves his inability to act when he procrastinate on killing Claudius over and over again. He did not kill him while Claudius was praying. He finds it hard to act on killing his mother even though he is sure that she broke her marriage vows..
In act 1 scene 2, Hamlets contemplates suicide but talks himself out of it, Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world!. In this quote Hamlet starts off by saying he wishes his skin would melt basically saying he wants to die because life seems to tired, stale, and pointless, but God has forbidden suicide. In the To be or not to be speech in Act 3 scene 1, Hamlet talks about commiting suicide but he is too scared to find out what lies beyond death. He believes that death is just a sleep. A sleep where you dream, but that is the problem. He is scared of what dreams will come.
Hamlet refuses to believe that his mother broke her wedding vows making it harder for him to kill her. When he enters her room in act 3 scene 4, he has full intent to kill her, but he never does. He just keeps asking her questions. She confesses and pleas to Hamlet that she has sins in her sole that are black and thick and will never wash away, yet Hamlet still refuses to kill her proving that he is unable to act when the time is right.
Hamlet wants to kill Claudius because the ghost of King Hamlet told Hamlet that Claudius killed him. The ghost of King Hamlet wants Hamlet to avenge his death. In act 1 scene 5 he says Haste me to know ‘t, that I, with wings as swift As meditation or the thoughts of love.
May sweep to my revenge. Hamlet believes the ghost wants to hurry and kill Claudius. He begins procrastinating on this thought when he says The time is out of joint. He doubts that the ghost is real so he starts procrastinating creating The Mousetrap which is a play reenactment of the death of Hamlet’s father. Instead of just killing Claudius, Hamlet sits through the play until there is hard evidence of Claudius acting strange out of guilt. Even though Hamlet now knows Claudius is guilty, he is given the perfect shot to kill Claudius while he is praying, but he blows it because he believes that if he kills Claudius while he is praying then Claudius will be sent to heaven and Hamlet doesn’t want that to happen.
In the end Hamlet finally gets everything he wants done, but in sacrifice of his own life. If Hamlet had began to work toward what he wanted without overthinking it and procrastinating then it might’ve gotten done and he could have lived. Instead Hamlet killed Claudius, his mother, and he dies like he always talked about.
Cited page
- https://prezi.com/zzpp7wt3qoda/hamlet-tragic-flaw/
- https://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/full.html
