Why Does Hamlet Delay To Kill Claudius

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The third component that makes Hamlet so unique is the detail in the storyline where Hamlet delays his revenge on Claudius. Prince Hamlet on the overall is the protagonist of Hamlet so we can see a lot of complexity in terms of his personalities and decisions throughout the play. He, in all characters, portrays a wide array of emotions. By nature, he is harsh and tends to act on impulse. And instance of this is the act of stabbing Polonius. Hamlet wants to take revenge for his father’s death. He is obsessed with proving that Claudius is the culprit, disappointed in the fact that his mother is in love with Claudius and marrying the guy, and then disgusted by this. So it is of no surprise that such a divergent, even a little mentally unstable, …show more content…
Hamlet could have stricken. But he actually delays his revenge with his reasoning being: if he killed Claudius while he is appealing to God, Claudius would end up going to heaven. The text is rephrased as I better not send the same man who kills my father to heaven. But between the lines, exactly why does Hamlet delay? According to Jackson G. Barry, Hamlet delays the revenge to “build the suspense of the head-on conflict between Hamlet and Claudius by keeping the nature of Hamlet’s evidence of the crime still in question.” (Barry, 120). According to Kawsar Uddin, based on psychoanalytic reading, Hamlet hesitated because of his desire for his mother: “For the central character Hamlet, mother remains the object of his sexual pleasure” (Uddin). As when he was a kid, he had an infantile desire to kill his father, King Hamlet. “Killing Claudius means killing the object of Gertrude’s desire. Hamlet cannot kill Claudius because the killing encounters the obstacle of mother’s desire.” (Uddin). Confused, Hamlet failed to strike where he obviously had what it takes to kill Claudius. “Hamlet’s procrastination in taking the revenge of his father’s death is contrived from his mother’s desire.” (Uddin) His procrastination rooted from the narcissist attachment with the mother. According to Margreta De Grazia, with Freud’s theory of repression in mind, Hamlet delays because of “an unconscious guilt” (Grazia, 371). Freud said: “It was a novelty, and nothing like it had ever before been recognized in mental life” (“An Autobiographical Study”, 18). He described the delay being an unconscious way to suppress the incestuous desires innate in ancient Oedipus. According to Fredson Bowers’ analysis, “Thus it is strength, not weakness that lies behind the delay, and it is a lack of fortitude that causes Hamlet to crack and to make his fatal blunder in the closet scene.” (Bowers, 216). The answer, therefore, to Hamlet’s

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