Hamlet is a Coward???

When looking deeply into the soliloquy present in the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, I noticed many things that I had previously skimmed over. I understood the events better and got a firmer grasp on some of the hidden elements of the play. Unfortunately this came too late as I wasn’t able to use it on the impossible quote test we just took, but there isn’t much I can do about it now. Recognizing an element of Hamlet’s persona on the other hand can never come too late. One element that really struck me, and was an element that I briefly broached in my essay, but did not really talk about in depth was the presence of Hamlet’s cowardice, or at least what I saw as cowardice. I may be completely off here, but hey, you got to take some risks in life.
Throughout the entire play, Hamlet constantly has thoughts about getting revenge on Claudius for killing his father. Hamlet sees the ghost in Act I and the ghost tells him that Claudius purposefully killed him to get the throne and start an incestuous relationship with King Hamlet’s ex-wife Gertrude. The thing about these thoughts is that they are just that, thoughts for he does nothing to ever act upon the thoughts. Every now and then, he undergoes periods of renewed conviction when he sees something in others that he admires, but after reinforcing his convictions, he goes back to doing nothing about them. A prime example of this is in his soliloquy in Act II when he talks about him being a rogue and a peasant slave. He states that he has ample motive to exact revenge, but does nothing calling himself a coward. He compares himself to a player that can act sad and speak words of grief when a death occurs, while he can do nothing but act sad. This again occurs in his soliloquy in Act IV when he admires the Norwegians for marching to their deaths for nothing more than honor and a patch of land not even big enough to bury all of their bodies. Here again, he complains about himself being a coward and states that he will change because he has a great argument to act as his father was killed and his mother stained. In both instances, Hamlet states that he will change and act, and in Act III, he does put on the play as promised, but once confirming Claudius’s role in his father’s murder he again does nothing. In Act IV, he makes a key distinction that essentially personifies Hamlet throughout the play. He states that his “thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth” (4.4.66). The key word here is again “thought” as he wishes for his thoughts to be bloody while he does nothing to act upon his thoughts. Even when he does actually do something, it is a disastrous occasion as most of the royal family dies leaving only Horatio alive. Hamlet always requires an outside source to renew convictions that never actually come into fruition. He is afraid of the outcomes of his actions as he states in the soliloquy in Act IV, and this fear and cowardice causes him to only renew his thoughts and never act upon them.

Invisible Oppression

The title The Invisible Man always causes thoughts of some science fiction thriller to rush through my head because the concept of invisibility is somewhat unknown to man. Sure, things can be camouflaged to appear invisible and they can hide from appearance by using things as cover, but true invisibility, and here I am talking about a condition when any seeing creature can look at you an see through you, has never been accomplished. Also, man is always afraid and extremely interested in the unknown, so I figured Ralph Ellison would take some weird approach on explaining invisibility through some obscure scientific concepts to satisfy his own interests. I was actually quite excited to read about something that could probably really spark my interest. The only problem was that I was completely wrong in my assumptions of the possible subject matter.
After reading through the first couple of pages in the novel, I realized that Ellison is going to explore a more figurative invisibility, but one that is just as interesting a topic, the inability of people to see the state of race relations. This topic is really only introduced a good ways into the novel when a fight breaks out between the people at the Golden Day saloon as one of the black veterans comments about a white man named Norton being blind to race relations. Despite the real discussion taking place in the meat of the novel, the introduction really struck me because of the fact that it is true, not the part about a man stealing electricity to light his home under a building but the part about how many are blind to the problems around them. In the case of civil rights, it took a man like Martin Luther King to come out and shed light upon an issue that many had chosen to turn a blind eye. In the case of the independence of many countries, such as India, it took a man like Gandhi to band the people together to strive for a goal that people had previously thought impossible or invisible. In the case of women’s rights, it took people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to band women under one banner to get the privileges they deserved. In all of these cases, the problems were apparent but remained invisible to the public until there was light shed upon the issue, light that could be taken as synonymous to the large amount of light present in the mans home. It is as if he is trying to fight his invisibility with an abundance of light so he becomes relevant again. This same light is shed upon Norton when he comes into the Golden Day saloon and witnesses the fight and hears the “doctor” talk to him about race relations. I will admit that I am a bit behind on my reading, but I can only guess how the rest of the novel will go as we learn more about the narrator’s invisibility and how he came to see himself in that way.

Raising the Bar

As we continue to read what I see now to be an amazing play by Shakespeare, the plot constantly thickens and becomes more interesting. I have to admit that I was a bit skeptical at first, at least in terms of the play being as good as it is thought to be. Before we read the play in class, some motifs and themes were discussed such as the sense of duty many of the characters displayed and the presence of many questions, but the sheer genius and numerous meanings the one could take from the play were also talked about a great deal. This to me kind of set the bar rather high, in terms of the confusion I was expecting to feel and the multiple meaning I was expecting to find, for Hamlet, a play that is widely regarded as one of the greatest tragedies of all time and an extremely famous play recognizable to almost all of the educated population. Although the bar was set rather high, I had a hard time believing that the bar could ever be met for how could one play be so full of meaning and wordplay to warrant the extensive study that had been done and the extensive study that we were going to do on it. When Ms. Clinch said that we could easily spend more than three months unraveling the mysteries of the play, my skepticism only increased. True, Shakespeare is brilliant, but I had read his plays before and not been completely lost.
Then…. we started reading the play, and I was not disappointed, although I not sure if that is a good thing or not at this point in time. The meaning is in abundance as there are multiple ways you can read the novel and the confusion is at an all time high as if I attempt to read any of the play by myself, I find myself completely lost. In terms of meaning, we have discussed four or five scenes that can be interpreted in multiple ways. That it already twenty-five different reading that can be done on the play and that is not even scratching the surface. An example of this is with the scene when he is with Ophelia. Hamlet can be seen as angry the whole time, or angry after a little bit; he can be seen as knowing that Polonius and Claudius are listening at the beginning of his talk, the middle of his talk, or never during his talks. On top of this, the wordplay is rather unbelievable as one word can have two or three meaning each offering a different perspective of the scene.
So far in class, we have read through Act IV, and it has definitely gotten interesting as I can only anticipate how Hamlet will go about ruining Claudius after missing his chance to kill the man after hearing his confession. I also wonder how Gertrude and Ophelia will end up when all is said and done. I guess all I can hope is that the ending matches the interest and confusion of what I have read so far. I am pretty certain that I will not be disappointed.
Now, it is time to get off of my friends laptop and watch the SUPERBOWL.

Pettiness

As much as I loath to admit, missing school actually hurts, at least when you are looking at it from the perspective of me being completely lost when reading Hamlet. I guess I could attempt to act like missing school during the second semester of senior year doesn’t really matter, but what I am trying to get across is that it kind of does, at least in AP Lit. I have tried to read a bit more of Hamlet, and haven’t really understood too much. But, from what we have read in class, one character has struck me in a not so good way. That character is not Hamlet, although his ability and mastery of the English language have led to some quite interesting wordplays, for he has left a good impression on me; the character is Polonius, who seems to be the most petty character I have ever seen in any novel or play.
The first time we see Polonius in the play, he doesn’t seem all that bad besides the fact that he is Claudius’s right hand man. After all, anyone who associates himself with evil, as the play has depicted Claudius to be, must have some not-so-good presence in him. However, what I assumed he lacked in character, at least he made up in loyalty to the present King. Then, he went along and gave his speech to Laertes and my opinion of him began to fall. He essentially told his son to uphold the family name and to not make an embarrassment of himself. Even in attempting to give Laertes sound advice, he came off as being self-centered as his line “to thine own self stay true” can be interpreted as stay true to the family name and don’t embarrass yourself. He even ends up sending a man, Reynaldo, to spy on his own son to make sure he doesn’t do anything embarrassing. Of course, Polonius manages to make himself look worse than normal when giving Reynaldo orders to spy on his son by telling Reynaldo what lines to use when talking Laertes as if Reynaldo is some incompetent peasant. All of this served to show that Polonius is completely obsessed with his image and with being in control of any situation. His love to be in control is accentuated by his plans with Ophelia as he all but forces her to stop seeing Hamlet and then goes back and changes his mind when he has something to gain from the relationship between Ophelia and Hamlet. He originally wants to keep Ophelia pure so her image, there I go again using the word, clean, but when Claudius and Gertrude talk about Hamlet’s madness and awkward behavior, Polonius is willing to sacrifice his daughter for his own betterment, the ultimate sign of pettiness. With the characterization given to Polonius, as he is a man completely driven by his image, you could almost compare him to Torvald from A Doll House by Henrik Ibsen. Torvald was also obsessed with image as Nora herself brought up in one of the arguments between the two. Although the comparison may be a stretch, Torvald and Polonius had one very common trait, their ever-present pettiness.

Frankenstein

This past week we completed the dreaded and time consuming Books on File assignment in AP Lit. Although it did take a bit too much work, especially for a person in the second semester of senior year, it did bring back memories of a novel that I had begun to forget in a way that I did not want. The novel I did was Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and was the best novel I have likely ever read in a class in high school. Normally the novels we read, at least in years past, have been of great literary value but extremely boring in terms of subject matter and the tone of the novels. Frankenstein provided a rare deviation from this trend as it was very interesting to read and actually held my interest, a feat few novels manage to do. For this reason, I did not wish to forget the novel as it is special to me in an extremely obscure way. Besides what’s not to love about a novel about a man creating life in the form of a monster that returns to haunt the creators very being until the creator dies. Ina cruel twist of irony, the creator and master becomes the slave as every action of the creator is dictated by what the monster wants or doesn’t want. Aside from the content matter and the story line of the novel, there were many aspects that have stuck with me, especially the theme of doubles in the novel. If not for the themes worksheet that Ms. Clinch gave us, I would never have thought of Victor and the monster being doubles, but once the idea was in my head, I began to notice the theme everywhere…well not really everywhere but in a lot of places. This all pretty much centered around the alternate title, The Modern Prometheus, and the effect of nature on the two main characters.
In a way, this is kind of reiterating the final exam essay, but that does not diminish how interesting it is. Prometheus was a titan who stole the secret of fire from the gods and was punished because of this. In creating life without the presence of a woman or god, Victor was essentially stealing the secret of life and was punished because of this. His punishment was basically the presence of the monster. By creating the monster, Victor was forced to endure constant suffering because of the appearance of the monster as well as the actions of the monster as it killed much of Victor’s family and friends. The monster also had a few connections to Prometheus, as it also endured suffering because of its abnormal appearance in relation to other men. Much fire was present in the story the monster told in the novel.
In terms of the natural aspect of the double present, whenever the two characters were happy, they were able to appreciate the beauty of nature. Whenever the two characters were distressed or depressed, the two were unable to see anything beautiful about the world around them. I could go into more depth, but I have already exceeded 500 words so I guess I will save that for another day.

The Invisible Man

This week marks the first real week back in school, and I have to say, it has gone relatively well. We haven’t really had any major tests, aside from the impossible AP Lit essay, or homework. One thing that I have started at home is reading the Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. To be honest, the novel is nothing like I expected it to be. When hearing the title Invisible Man, I thought about a science fiction novel about a man that somehow became biologically invisible and experienced many things in the world from a unique perspective. The man had maybe made himself irreversibly invisible and had somehow conveyed some sort of life lesson through the events that happened to him. This of course is nothing like the actual novel, which I suppose is good because it makes for a very interesting storyline. In the first few lines of the novel, Ellison details that the character is invisible from a figurative sense because he has been ignored due to the color of his skin. The invisibility basically comes not from the fact that people can not see him, but because they refuse to acknowledge him as well as the rest of the African Americans in the US. This brings about a very interesting discussion topic as it was clear that equal rights for all minorities was a big problem, but nothing was really done about it until Martin Luther King Jr. and many other leaders forced the world to realize the situation. It was almost as if the world, or at least the US, could not see the invisible problem despite being apparent to many. This invisibility, which translates into a lack of action by the majority of people, has been a problem for centuries and I can only guess that the novel will go on to discuss the invisibility in greater depth.
During the many liberation movements and civil rights movements that have occurred throughout history, there have been many similarities. One is that people realize that there is a problem, but not much is done about it until a leader appears and takes the situation in his or her own hands. This is exactly what happened with Gandhi in South Africa and in India as he let the people rise up against the oppressive British. It is also exactly what happened with MLK as he led the African Americans and other minorities to fight for their rights against the oppression faced in the US. In both cases, the problem was apparent, but remained invisible to the general public as nothing was done about the issues for a long time. Another example can be with the feminist and women’s rights movements as chauvinistic tendencies had been around forever, but it took the efforts of a few women, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others at conventions such as the Seneca Falls Convention, to really get the ball rolling in passing suffrage amendments. I haven’t really read enough of the novel to understand the story line, but after looking through the first couple of pages, I realize why the name Invisible Man can mean more than its literal definition, but can also encompass the struggle of the oppressed.

Philosophies

This past summer, I attended the Governor’s Honors Program (GHP), an intensive academic program that brings together some of the brightest minds in the state of Georgia for six weeks. The program is divided in to a major, which involves an extensive interview and application process, and a minor, which is chosen after a student is accepted into GHP. My major was in the field of mathematics and my minor was in that of communicative arts. The whole experience was intellectually stimulating in and of itself as I spent six weeks of the summer sharing ideas with some of the most intelligent students I had ever met, but there was one class in particular that really got the juices flowing, a class called "Perception vs. Reality." The class was formatted in such a way that it was a long discussion in which topics, such as the "I think therefore I am" solipsistic philosophies of Descartes, which also appear in the "I create the universe blink be blink" philosophy of John Gardener in the novel Grendel, and the nihilist philosophy of Turgenev, were conversed upon. Although the class was very interesting and intellectually stimulating as everyday I entered looking forward to a great debate on whether the world exists as a reality or not between me and several students of equally high intelligence, there is something about philosophers, such as Descartes and Turgenev, that throws the mind and body on a loop that never ends up back where it starts. Just hearing the argument that the world does not exist outside of ourselves can have a great impact on a person. In my case, the engaging experience opened my eyes to the many realities or illusions presented in life and caused my mind to adopt a more open mindset, one where the endless possibilities of life can be realized.

The class itself actually prepared me well for the different philosophies presented in both Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Grendel by John Gardner. Both novels are highly philosophical in nature as Grendel undergoes a major transformation in the novel. At first, Grendel associates everything with his mother and "smouldering eyes" that he sees in the dark. Then, Grendel continues on to his solipsism philosophy that he is the only being that exists in the world and that he is center of the universe. When he comes into contact with the Shaper and hears all of his poems and songs, Grendel then converts to a nihilist philosophy, especially after his encounter with the dragon. He feels that everything in meaningless and it is apparent that he does not believe in fate. Even when he is about to die, he claims that Beowulf coming was an accident and that his death also was not meant to be. In Frankenstein, some philosophy was also presented, especially that of nihilism in the form of the monster's view on life without a companion or someone to harass. Because the monster is all alone in the world, he sees no meaning in life so asks for a companion and when Victor denies him this, the monster goes on to harass Victor. This is his meaning in life, but when he has successfully destroyed Victor, there is nothing left for him to do so he goes to the ice cap to die. The story is rather sad, but still seems to echo nihilism, a philosophy I learned in GHP.