He is disgusted with himself; contemptous of his own weak inadequacy and his fearful failings. Through this soliloquy, the audience continues to learn more about Hamlet; to appreciate his confused emotional state; to understand his depressed guilty turmoil. In this soliloquy, Shakespeare uses metaphors, rhetorical questions, and repetition to express Hamlet’s indecision regarding what he should do. Shakespeare uses metaphors to express Hamlet’s view of life, death, and the afterlife. Hamlet first introduces the idea of suicide as a way to end the sufferings of life: “and by a sleep to say we end/ The heartache and the thousand natural shocks/ That flesh is heir to”
Shakespeare also incorporates religious undertones in this soliloquy because of the metaphor of the afterlife and the dreams that may come. Hamlet eventually comes to a decision to not take his life because he is afraid of the unknown: “Thus conscience does make cowards And thus the native hue of resolution/ Is o’er with the pale cast of thought,/ And enterprises of great pitch and moment/ With this regard their currents turn awry/ And lose the name of action”. With his decision, Shakespeare is expressing the conscience as the logical part of Hamlet that is afraid because he does not know what would come with death. The metaphor in lines ninety-two and ninety-three is referring to the instinctual action of suicide overpowered by fears. professional research proposal writers