Hamlet by JD'

“To be or not to be that is the question” is not in my mind the greatest part of Hamlet,because It is an over simplification. In fact I think that it is an over simplification is one of the key messages of the speech. Hamlet wishes he could end his confusions, but he can’t be sure that in ending his life things will be easier. Who’s to say there is not another place with more problems to deal with? He’s searching for finality and can’t find it. He is attempting to distract himself from his real problems the “little” things which make up one’s life. The average person does not wake up and ask “life or death?” but rather how am I going to deal with life. Hamlet is betrayed by his friends and family .If he just killed himself it would not be an interesting play.At the end of the play Hamlet tells Horatio"If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, / Absent thee from felicity a while, / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story."The story is clearly more than “Hamlet chose death.”One of my other favorite set of lines in Hamlet is shortly after “to be or not tot be in Act 3, Scene 1
HAMLET Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a
breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest;
but yet I could accuse me of such things that it
were better my mother had not borne me: I am very
proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at
my beck than I have thoughts to put them in,
imagination to give them shape, or time to act them
in. What should such fellows as I do crawling
between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves,
all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery.
Where's your father?
This to me is where the action picks up again where Hamlet deals with his problems and at the same time avoids them.A nunnery is both a whore house and a cloister because Ophelia is either to good for him or another betrayer. He can’t or won’t decide but either way she needs to leave because he can’t fully understand her or connect with her because he lives in ambiguity. He doesn’t know what to classify himself as. The real question of Hamlet is What to be, and who he/we are whether we can change or control it.That is the truly universal question we deal with everyday identity and what we want or can make our story be.