Hamlet's Descent Into Madness Analysis

As Hamlet’s story begins, we see that he consciously slips into madness; After some time, we can see that his hallucinations start getting more and more real, which we can assume as to him becoming actually mad. We could say that in his eyes, the means justified the ends, and he had his ends very clearly objectified, but as the progress of achieving the ends occurs, the ends became blurry and his actions insane, which lead me to believe he was a little.. off and, undoubtedly, depressed even before the problems started and slowly got into a deeper hole of madness. At the beginning of the play, Hamlet’s objective is to avenge his father’s death by proving his uncle Claudius murdered him. There are some events that prove Hamlet going insane, such as when he spoke to the ghost and blindly believed in what he said, which served as the basis for the plot. But, how exactly can we define madness? According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, madness is the state of being mentally ill, especially severely; extremely foolish behavior; a state of frenzied or chaotic activity. Thus, Hamlet fits into the category of “extremely foolish behavior; a state of frenzied or chaotic activity” as his actions are driven by irrational and incongruent behavior, as is his quest for vengeance (in my opinion, almost every quest for vengeance is irrational). Of course that, …show more content…
This is an example of irrationality, where we can see that Hamlet’s faked madness is becoming a true part of him. Another time his actions showed complete absurdity was when he proceeded to murder his very good friend Polonius, without a justification for