Is Hamlet Contemplating Suicide Analysis

What is the Question?

“To be or not to be, that is the question.” However, the real question is if Hamlet is contemplating suicide or not in his famous soliloquy. There are endless debates about whether or not Hamlet is contemplating suicide. I believe that Hamlet is not contemplating suicide. He is more or less reflecting on his life and explaining why someone would not want to commit suicide. There are many reasons that I will present that help me make this conclusion. First, I will talk about what lead up to him talking about life. Then, I will break down Hamlet’s soliloquy and show that he is not, in fact, contemplating suicide throughout it.

The play starts off with Prince Hamlet feeling depressed. He is coming home from school just

As he continues with his speech, he states that having life comes with many other things. Life comes with responsibilities and misfortunes and the only way to get out of those things is to end your life. Therefore, death is a way of taking action against your misfortune. But you have to take action while you are alive to be dead. So Hamlet is talking in circles with his logic. He says that death is nothing but a sleep. However he also says that we often change our way of thinking because of our fear of life after death. Hamlet has this fear which makes him reconsider contemplating suicide. We can not control our dreams, so with death or “sleep”, we can not control what may happen. The same things may happen in those dreams that happen in real life or it may be even worse. We can never be quite sure. This also scares him and stops him from committing

Hamlet puts a religious view on the situation by saying, “conscious does make cowards of us all”. This makes everything more intense. He not only talks about killing himself but also the mission that he is on to avenge his father’s death by killing his father’s murderer. There are many times in the play where Hamlet is given the opportunity to kill Claudius but shies away. He does this because killing somebody is a sin. This also strikes fear in him about what life after death might be like (“To Be Or Not To Be’: Hamlet’s Soliloquy”).

At the end of his soliloquy, Hamlet decides that the more he ponders about this kind of stuff, the more it is going to cause him to not take action. Hamlet talks about how life is not very rewarding and how negative it is throughout his speech. But I still do not think that he is contemplating suicide. A list of everything he says he hates in life are in the following lines:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of