To Speak Or Not To Speak

     Throughout the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, the main character, Hamlet, delivers many soliloquies and asides to himself.  Their effect on the plot and the development of the characters in the play turn Hamlet's words themselves into actions, and my own self-overhearing is similar to Hamlet's in the way I use it to talk myself through making decisions and understanding a present situation.
     Hamlet's lengthy soliloquies complement Hamlet's actions by illustrating the progression of his thoughts and allowing him to think through the many conflicts he encounters, both internal and external, by talking himself through the situation.  For example, Hamlet's famous speech "To Be Or Not To Be" is his outlet for contemplating suicide and his existence while addressing the reasons against it.  This is evident through his concerns for the afterlife in the quote, "For who would fardels bear/To grunt and sweat under a weary life/But that the dread of something after death/The undiscovered country from whose born/No traveler returns, puzzles the will/And makes us rather bear those ills we have/Than fly to others that we know not of?"  Later in the play, Hamlet talks himself through another internal conflict when he sees King Claudius, his uncle and suspected murderer of Hamlet's father, praying and he thinks out loud whether or not to kill him then.
     The content of that contemplative speech shows Hamlet's dynamic character as the audience is able to identify the evolution of his choices and personality in the play.  In the "To Be Or Not To Be" speech, Hamlet is uncertain what lies for him after death, and this is the main reason he chooses not to kill himself.  In the speech when Hamlet is contemplating murdering Claudius, however, he chooses not to kill Claudius while he is praying because he is worried that Claudius would go to heaven, not to hell.  Before, Hamlet's uncertainty about life after death prevented him from killing, but in that speech later in the play, Hamlet's certainty about where Claudius would go to after death prevents him from killing.
     My own self-overhearing talks myself through situations and usually leads to a better comprehension of the subject of my utterances.  For example, the "To Be Or Not To Be" speech isn't written in the common vernacular of today, and the first couple of times I read it, I didn't understand it.  As I was memorizing it, however, I started to comprehend Hamlet's meaning of each sentence because in my process of memorization of the speech, I divided it into small segments and repeated each segment many times, memorizing it alone and then combining it with the one before, slowly building the entire speech in my head.  Through this repetition and through hearing myself out loud, I developed a better understanding of the internal conflict Hamlet describes throughout the soliloquy about whether or not he should kill himself and how thinking about its consequences convinces him not to.
     In the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Hamlet delivers many soliloquies that talk himself through difficult situations.  During these soliloquies, we see the progression of the thoughts and motives of Hamlet, Shakespeare's technique for creating a character who the audience can sympathize with because they understand his reasoning.  In addition to character development, Hamlet's speeches serve as Hamlet's outlet for working out all of the complications within his family and his own self-deprecation.  The only similarity between Hamlet's self-overhearing and my own is that I also use it to occasionally comprehend my surroundings.