Becoming Hero in William Shakespeares Hamlet Essay -- William shakesp

Becoming Hero in William Shakespeare's Hamlet The hero; the most dominant of archetypes throughout time and culture, is represented in the following description of the basic unit of the monomyth by the mythic scholar Joseph Campbell, â€Å" A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man." It is in this light that we moderns as well as our ancestors have given life and formation to our universal struggles. By representing the greater tribe, community, country, etc†¦ each story has within it, a character who leads and who undertakes that primordial journey toward a destination that will ultimately restore vitality or provide that elixir to her people, which is so needed. However complex, our world has brought forth several thousand variations on the hero itself, with as many problems and hopes as a people might have, so too does the heroic character of a culture embody them. Yet, as complicated and nuanced and non-traditional a society’s representative hero might be, the character of Hamlet seems to be the most unique in that more than creating an anti-hero who still provides in some way for his people, albeit in a way that bucks societies’ cultural norms, Shakespeare has created his story around a man who destroys rather than builds and a hero who subverts the archetype so much, that the basic tenants of heroic description must be altered in order to recognize him at all for what he seems to be. In the traditions of the hero archetype, the journey of the hero follows a path that can be symbolized by the markers of d... ...es, directed towards him, at which he is powerless to defend. At the burial scene, where Hamlet has unwittingly encountered death, first with the accidental discovery of Yorick, and then with the accidental discovery of Ophelia, he is forced into a plot not of his own doing. By returning from England with thoughts of action and of blood on his mind, he has been placed in the direct pathway of the revenge of Laertes for the death of his father. Used by Claudius, Laertes is imbued with his own hatred as well as the intellectual powers of the King. By juxtaposing Hamlet and Laertes over the grave of Ophelia, Shakespeare has created a scene where Hamlet has lost sight of his true mission again, this time to prove his skills of articulation and of false mourning for his tormented lover, â€Å"Forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum."

Native Son character Essay

The protagonist and main character of Native Son is Bigger Thomas. He is the focus of the novel and the embodiment of its main idea–the effect of racism on the mental state of its black victims. Richard Wright’s exploration of Bigger’s psychological corruption gives us a perspective on the effect that racism had on the black population in 1930s America. Some critics of Native Son have questioned the effectiveness of Bigger as a character. For instance, the famous black writer James Baldwin has considered Bigger as too narrow to represent the full scope of black experience in America, but I believe he is a powerful and disturbing symbol of black rage. As a 20-year-old black man cramped in a Chicago South Side apartment with his family, Bigger has lived a life defined by the fear and anger he feels toward whites. Bigger is limited by the eighth-grade departure from school, and by the racist real estate practices that forced him to live in poverty. Furthermore, he is subjected to messages from a popular culture that portrays whites as civilized and sophisticated and blacks as barbaric and subservient. Racism has severely reduced Bigger’s opportunities in life and even his conception of himself. He is ashamed of his family’s poverty and afraid of the whites who control his life–feelings he works hard to keep hidden, even from himself. When these feelings overwhelm him, he reacts with violence. â€Å"These were the rhythms of his life: indifference and violence; periods of abstract brooding and periods of intense desire; moments of silence and moments of anger–like water ebbing and flowing from the tug of some far-away, invisible force.† (31) Bigger robs people with his friends–though only other blacks, as the gang is too frightened to rob a white man–but his own violence is often directed at these friends as well. Bigger sees white people as an overpowering and hostile force that is set against him in life. Just as whites fail to conceive of Bigger as an individual, he does not really distinguish between individual whites–to him, they are all the same, frightening and untrustworthy. Bigger feels little guilt after he accidentally kills Mary, the daughter of his white employers. In fact, he feels for the first time as though his life actually has purpose and meaning. Mary’s murder makes him believe that he has the power to assert himself against whites. Wright goes out of his way to show  that Bigger is not a conventional protagonist, as his brutality and capacity for violence are extreme, especially in graphic scenes such as the one in which he decapitates Mary’s corpse in order to stuff it into the furnace. Wright does not present Bigger as a hero to admire, but as a frightening and disturbing character created by racism. Wright’s point is that Bigger becomes a brutal killer because the dominant white culture fears that he will become a brutal killer. Wright emphasizes this vicious cycle of racism: though Bigger’s violence stems from racial hatred, it only increases the racism in American society, as it confirms racist whites’ basic fears about blacks. In Wright’s depiction, whites effectively transform blacks into their own negative stereotypes. Only when Bigger meets Max, his white, communist lawyer, does Wright offer any hope of breaking this cycle of racism. Through interaction with Max, Bigger begins to perceive whites as individuals. Only when sympathetic understanding exists between blacks and whites will they be able to see each other as individuals, not merely as members of a stereotyped group. After he meets Max and learns to talk through his problems Bigger begins to redeem himself, recognizing white people as individuals for the first time and realizing the extent to which he has been affected by racism. Early on in Native Son, Wright describes how Bigger retreats behind a â€Å"wall† to keep the reality of his situation from overwhelming him. This passage from Book Two shows the destructive effects of Bigger’s retreat. â€Å"There was something he knew and something he felt; something the world gave him and something he himself had†¦Never in all his life, with this black skin of his, had the two worlds, thought and feeling, will and mind, aspiration and satisfaction, been together; never had he felt a sense of wholeness.† (225) He is isolated not only from his friends and family, but from himself as well. It seems that the black psyche is always divided. Bigger’s mind is split in two, leaving him unable to interact with others and unable to understand himself. It is this quest for wholeness that dominates Bigger’s  life. Tragically, it is not until he has murdered two women and is soon to be executed that he is able to understand and grasp this wholeness. He is thrilled by his new realization, yet tormented by the fact that it comes too late, when he has only precious little time left to live.

Types of Seahorses