Examples Of Guilt In Macbeth

The Deep Scar of Guilt To some people, the guilt of betraying a friend isn’t that big, but to others, it holds a significant effect on their entire character. In the play Macbeth by William Shakespeare, Shakespeare writes about a man named Macbeth who starts off as a hero but then slowly descends into a state of madness and bloodlust after he learns that he’s fated to be King. Therefore, Shakespeare is trying to show that guilt is the main reason for Macbeth’s downfall by depicting it as a deep-mental scar that always haunting him, as reflected by Banquo’s Ghost and his the hallucinations during Duncan’s murder. To start off, one of the ways that Shakespeare attempts to show that guilt is the main reason for Macbeth’s downfall is by having

Before Macbeth was about to kill Duncan, he was hesitant about committing the act but he had to go through with it then he sees a floating dagger and he asked himself “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee…Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible to feeling as to sight?” (Shakespeare 2.1.44-46, 48-49). We can see that Macbeth sees a floating dagger and he tries to grab it but it isn’t there, which shows that he’s not in his right mind right now. This manifestation of the dagger could be caused by Macbeth’s future guilt of killing the king because he has expressed thoughts to Lady Macbeth that Duncan was a good and innocent king. After the murder of Duncan, Macbeth was paranoid and scared so he hurriedly went back to his room and had an illusion that he described as “With all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No This my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red” (Shakespeare 2.2.78-81). After killing King Duncan, he returns to his room and hallucinates a much more large pool of blood on his hand than the sea. Blood is a symbol of the guilt that he is forever scarred on him so that’s why it was hard for him to wash it off because most of the blood was not

To summarize it all, the multiple hallucinations that Macbeth had throughout the play were due to his guilt of killing many of his close friends. The more close friends that he killed, the more insane and paranoid he became. This shows that guilt is a deep scar within Macbeth so that’s why he went into a downward spiral. In conclusion, Macbeth’s guilt is the main reason for his downfall because guilt is the reason for the destruction of many characters in the play. From Macbeth’s point of view, we see that he starts off as a heroic person and ends up as a tyrant. Which shows that guilt can have a very long and lasting impact on a