Guilt In Macbeth And Death Of A Salesman

The human actions and dreams can reflect people’s emotions and conscious desires. Sometimes when a person is troubled inside, he or she has hallucinations or commits horrible actions which reflect his or her true feelings. For example, in The Scarlet Letter, Reverend Dimmesdale screamed out and also cut an A on his chest because of his guilt of committing adultery (Hawthorne). Not only will people hurt or scream out in anguish, but will also hallucinated what is and what is not reality. For instance, Willy Loman, in Death of a Salesman, distorts the past and present because of the guilt of cheating on his wife and lying to his family (Miller). It is normal for people to go mad because of guilt. In the play Macbeth, by William Shakespeare,

The floating dagger is the starting point of Macbeth’s peculiar imaginations, and portray his worries and guilt for what is to come and the future. In the back of his conscious, Macbeth perceives he will have to commit dark, horrible crimes to become and stay king. He even questions the possibility in the first act of the play and states, “Against the use of Nature? Present fears are less than horrible imaginings. My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical” (Mac.1.3.150-152). His quote is the beginning of his violent thoughts and the dagger is also represents temptation and encouragement into Macbeth’s violent destiny. As Macbeth waited to kill the king his courage started to decrease so he imagine the dagger as an

The dagger is his temptation and represents his future destiny of violence. His hallucinations represent his guilty conscious and temptation, but also inspire him to continue to kill to stay king. However, he does not realize that he can not kill more to run away from what he has done and what his destiny is. As the play continue, Macbeth becomes worse and worse and his hallucinations represent how he is digging deeper into madness. All together his visions are a symbol of his violence, actions, and