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Life And Death In Hamlet

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The Life After Death
Suicide and homicide often have roots in a confused and unbalanced relationship between the life and the death instincts. “The destructive impulses may be turned against one 's own self (suicide) or projected against an external target (homicide). Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, proposed that each human has a life instinct and a death instinct. The death drive seeks destruction¬– life 's return to an inorganic state. The play Hamlet by William Shakespeare is one of the tragedies that is centered around death and it can never become out dated because death will forever remain one of the greatest mysteries of …show more content…

At the beginning of the play Hamlet’s obsession with death is a personal mater, but gradually his questions and interpretations about death becomes generalized to the whole human mortality. In the gravediggers’ scene, more than any other scene in this play, death is present and Shakespeare emphasize on the mortality of all people and he uses a skull and a gravedigger as a symbol of death. A philosophical conversation takes place between Hamlet and the gravedigger, who is digging a grave for Ophelia. For the gravedigger the skull is worthless, he sees life and death as an interconnected affair, and therefore he is singing while digging; but Hamlet establishes a linear relationship and a historical curve between the people who died before and who dies now. In this scene, he takes the Yorick’s skull, his father’s former jester, and remember his vibrant and the time that they spent together, then he comes to this point where he realizes that even someone as vibrant as Yorick turns into dust and becomes nothing. Then he asks Horatio “Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’ th’ earth?” (5.1.73) Hamlet realizes that death eliminates the differences between people and the hierarchical structure of society is illusory, and ultimately it all collapse into clay, he recalled that “Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away” (5.1.93-94) Just like the heroes and great people who turned in to bone and dust, he will be the

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