Fearing Fear

Overthinking: the enemy of success. Whether it’s asking the woman you love out on a date or killing the uncle you hate, people are driven by emotion and throughout literature authors have long fought to find what is that makes us stutter. Elliot and Shakespeare take us through the journey of hesitant characters to uncover the blockade between the conscious mind and sentiment and offer a solution.

Hamlet and J. Alfred Prufrock are spears of literature aimed at revealing the internal conflict characters face as they take decisions. Even though these two character’s goals are far from the same, the mindset they possess in order to tackle this goal is the comparable. They are unable to deduce how to deal with repressed emotions. Hamlet claims,

“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sickled o’er with the pale cat of thought” 3.1 L91

Much like Hamlet, J Alfred encounters the same problem: hesitation. He is unable to confront his feelings toward an unnamed woman and lacks “the strength to force the [decision to ask her] to its crisis?” (line 80) They’ve met a barrier that has led them to hesitate and being aware of the barrier both characters fill with self-loathing. When Prufrock mentions Hamlet, “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be” (line 111) He realizes he has encountered the same problem the famous prince of Denmark faced, a wall. This psychological barrier that both characters encounter represents a real and ever present barrier between emotion and human understanding. Shakespeare and T.S Elliot leave their characters feeling helpless against indecision in the hopes that readers will reflect on its moral and practical implications.

Shakespeare explores more of the moral implications Hamlet’s indecision has. By hesitating, Hamlet is a being normal. He actually considers the effects murder would have. Perhaps Shakespeare suggest that being a reasonable human being entails having indecision. However human hate it, Prufrock despises himself for being unable to commit and act. He became such a reasonable man that he became weak. Combining the meaning behind both of the pieces of literature we can conclude that indecision takes part of being normal but we must be careful not to become too normal and have indecision take over.