Monday, November 17, 2014

Hamlet's Role as an Unreliable Narrator

In Hamlet, there is no narrator. The reader has to understand the story purely through dialogue. In a sense, the characters who participate in this dialogue become the narrators. The problem with this is that Hamlet has more dialogue in the play than any other character. He also has multiple monologues and conversations with a ghost no one else ever speaks to. Hamlet dominates the role of "narrator" in the story. Hamlet is very driven by his emotions, and at his sanity is often called into question. This makes him an unreliable narrator. He often exaggerates or offers false information (for example his father's death goes from two months ago to less than one month ago in the same speech). Unreliable narrators are also present in other books we've read. The Things They Carried, Heart of Darkness, and  Mrs. Dalloway all have subjective, emotion driven narrators. Interestingly, none of those books aim to convince the reader of their accuracy. Instead they all aim to portray certain truths about human nature that apply even in these doubly-fictitious worlds. This leads me to think that this was Shakespeare's goal as well.

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