Hamlet 5

Passage:

Act 3 Scene 1 Line 64 - 98
Hamlet:

"To be or not to be - that is the question:
Wheather 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer...
...be all my sins remembered."

- I chose this passage because it is the one that everyone knows from the play - and therefore must hold some significance. In this passage, Hamlet is pondering the ideas of life and death. This is important because what he is living for at the moment, is to ensure the death of his father is avenged. This passage connects all of Hamlet's conflicts and issues ( his father, the king, Opelia) into one idea.

-The diction within the passage seems to glorify the idea of death over that of living. All words associated with living - pangs, insolence, spurns- are harsh and have hard sounds. At line 86, Hamlet's focus seems to shift to death. The words used here are not harsh, but dark. They reflect the idea that death is the unknown, and therefore may, or may not be, better than life. The syntax and setup of the passage as a whole, with the ideas of life and death set against each other, represent the conflict within Hamlet himself. He does not know what he is living for any more, but is haunted by the idea of death because of his father.