The Helplessness of Man

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be altered through even heroic, ultimately futile human effort, as he significantly doubts the likelihood that people retain any control whatsoever over their fates.

Hamlet’s vulnerability and that of the human race is reflected through his somber, world weary tone with which he lists the litany of difficulties individuals and people experience in their day to day lives and the options available to relieve earthly suffering. Hamlet assures his listeners that faced with so very many trials and tribulations, no reasonable individual “would bear the whips and scorns of time, [t]h’ oppressors wrong,” (78-79) while, he, or any other similarly oppressed individual “himself might his quietus make [w]ith a bare bodkin” (83-84), or assure death through a simple cut of the knife. Given the certainty of afterlife combined with fear of suicide’s consequences, the easiest of escapes from life’s tribulations is fraught with fear to the point of elimination as an option. He compares death to a foreign country which reflects on the similarity between feelings of trepidation at the thought of unknowns such as foreign travel in an uneasy age in which one may well not return, with the still more significant voyage into death and afterlife. If Hamlet is to believe the evidence of his own eyes and experience with his father’s poltergeist, death, “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns” (87-88), is still more certain than the metaphorical earthly travel with similarly unknowable consequences. For Hamlet, the post suicide afterlife presents a dilemma and frames his problem as he considers whether to accept the status quo of life or risk radical retribution for a different decision. When he questions whether he or others would “rather bear those ills we have [t]han fly to others that we know not of?” (89-90), Hamlet weighs knowns against unknowns, action against inaction, and earthly torment against potential eternal damnation. Paralyzed, fearful and with no evident or certain answers in sight, Hamlet appears to reject suicide as he leans to the default, barely endured living.

In Hamlet, Shakespeare describes what appears to be a relatively dire situation. Although suicide is the clear escape for those suffering from a bleak outlook on life, our vulnerability as human beings to fear prevents us from saving ourselves. Throughout the passage, Hamlet demonstrates how the unknown, and in particular the imagination, informed in part by religious beliefs, of an afterlife more cruel than life itself, holds us back. When one sleeps, they are at the mercy of their imagination, and one can’t help but ask “what dreams may come … [w]hen we have shuffled off this mortal coil” (74-75). Fear, which surrounds us and prevents one from making rational decisions, only delays death. All things must come to an end and though humans are vulnerable to fear, all are subject to death. Shakespeare’s tragedies attempt to demonstrate the catastrophic side of human nature and existence, and to this end Hamlet is a superb example. One can’t ponder death without envisioning the afterlife, and for Hamlet this is a realm of uncertainty, which is worse than definite doom. All things considered, Hamlet’s soliloquy discusses a fear of the unknown, not a fear of what that unknown may be which prompts the question: “To be, or not to be?” (64). No one will likely ever never know the secrets that lie after death and for this reason, there will never be a correct answer to this inquiry.

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