Hamlet- To be or not to be

The opening line of Hamlet's to be or not to be speech could mean many things. The first could be him saying to be alive or to be dead. Here, he could be talking about himself, his father, or even to be alive but to not be living to the fullest or living in misery. When you are depressed, you often feel that you are alive but nothing is really happening and everything is a blur. Supposedly, it is a feeling of emptiness so that could be part of the to be or not to be alive theory. Another thing the opening line could mean is to be a murder or not. This could, again, be about Hamlet himself or it could be about his uncle murdering his father. Hamlet is thinking really hard about killing his uncle and he could also be saying in the opening line to kill his uncle or not. Personally, I think that in the opening line he is talking about being alive or not. He has been feeling extremely depressed since his dad passed away and the feeling has gotten even worse since he found out from his father's ghost that his uncle was really the one that killed his father. This new made Hamlet extremely angry and feels betrayed.

When Hamlet says "to take arms again a sea of troubles" I think he means to end his misery and kill himself. In the next line, he says, "and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to" Hamlet is surrounded by troubles and heartache and he feels that it would be easier on himself to end it all. Earlier in the play, he says that he would kill himself if it wasn't considered a sin. It seems strange that Hamlet would be talking to himself like this but I think he genuinely didn't know anyone was watching him and that the things he said were true. The thought occurs that Hamlet might think that the ghost of his father isn't really his father but the devil trying to get him to make a mistake by accusing his uncle of murder when he is innocent.

Another though Hamlet mentions in his soliloquy is the thought of the afterlife or hell being worse than his life now. "To grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death " this is where he is saying that other than the fact that killing yourself is a sin, there is no gaurauntee that the afterlife is any better than the life he is experiencing now. Death is the unknown while his own miserable life is known to him so he decides that he won't kill himself.