Mystery Of Death In Hamlet Essay

It’s always about what’s going to happen next. It’s common for everyone to constantly wait for something else. People wait for the weekend, or they wait to graduate. It’s never about what’s happening right now. Because off all this waiting, it’s easy to lose the day-to-day importance somewhere. But, after a while, everything people have been waiting for comes to an end, and what people are waiting for isn’t the end. The biggest ending of them all is inevitable: death. And even though it is something that everyone knows must happen, there is a lot of mystery behind it. The play Hamlet, written by William Shakespeare, explores this mystery of death in-depth. The entire play focuses on the prince of Denmark, Hamlet, and before the play even starts his father is killed by his uncle, Claudius. He spends the entire play trying to get revenge on his uncle, who in addition to killing his father, …show more content…
Hamlet talks about the mystery of the afterlife in his famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy (III.i.64). After contemplating suicide for the second time in the play, Hamlet delves into what he thinks the afterlife will truly be like. “To sleep—perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub! / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, / when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, / must give us pause—there’s the respect / that makes calamity of so long life” (III.i.73-77). His metaphor for the afterlife deals solely with it being like going to sleep. Hamlet believes that dying will be like closing his eyes for the night, and the afterlife will be like the mysterious dreams that occur. He, along with everyone else, doesn’t know what is going to happen next. This explanation of death differs from the common idea that death is the ending of everything. Hamlet’s idea makes it seem that there is something more to