The actions Hamlet demonstrate as the play progresses provide a glimpse at the stability of his mind. Hamlet’s downward spiral into genuine madness proved to be just the beginning by deciding to act mad instead of continuing with his grief as a front for his revenge. By acting mad, he is unintentionally drawing attention to himself, his actions and will postpone his attempt at vengeance. The second manifestation can be seen in his treatment of Ophelia. She has done nothing to Hamlet, yet he attempts to scare her as part of his plan to seem mad. However, this is not a childish prank, but, an over exaggeration due to his slipping mind. Another demonstration is in the play-within-the-play. Hamlet already believes Claudius is the culprit. Apparently, this was his master plan to show King Claudius he knew about his father. However, the show implied that a nephew was the killer and alerted the king to take measures against Hamlet thereby, making the court and the king wary of Hamlet’s behaviors. This was not the act of a sane individual; clearly he was advancing in his instability. A further illustration in his increasing madness is in the treatment of his mother. By the time he is asked to visit her, he has lost reality. His suspicions about the King have been confirmed and he has revealed the secret of his madness act to the King. The conversation with his mother is full of sexual connotations and angered outbursts. Therefore, Hamlet’s madness has reached its climax and his pretenses have now consumed him.
The idea that Hamlet is a young man on the brink of insanity is not unbelievable. The losses and events he sustained could drive anyone to madness. However, they merely aided in his mental deterioration. In reality, this play explored the idea of how a person reacts to human responsibility, and choices between justice and revenge.
In the 1940s times were rough for the average American. The war was over and people were disillusioned about the American Dream. The belief that failure was not always the fault of the individual was floating around because of the stock market crash. These hardships created a mind set that made an entire generation realize that to get ahead, individuals must work diligently, and not rely on anyone besides themselves to achieve success. In Death of a Salesman, the protagonist Willy Loman can not see past his self-established and maintained limitations to achieve wealth, which is what Willy views as one of the only important goals in life, and his attempts at achieving wealth are what ultimately causes his downfall.
All throughout his life, Willy has been a failure to himself and to his family. The first failure in his life was when he decides not to accompany his older brother Ben on an expedition to Alaska to find their father who had abandoned them in a search for personal wealth. Ben was supposed to go to Alaska, but instead, he ended up discovering an African diamond mind and became rich only a few years. The thought of becoming rich in less than ten years by the mistake of a third party, in this case whoever sent Ben to Africa instead of Alaska, intrigues Willy to the extent that Willy creates a mental projection of Ben to talk to after Ben dies. Willy must know the secret of how Ben became rich over night, but all that Ben can ever say is “When I was seventeen I walked out into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich.” Willy’s second failure in his life is that he has done nothing noteworthy with his life. After decades with the same company, he gets laid off because he is not selling enough door to door merchandise. Willy is too old to start a new career now, so he thinks of the final avenue he can use to obtain money for his family: his twenty-thousand dollar life insurance policy. In his last noble effort as Willy Loman, he becomes instantly wealthy, and instantly dead.
Willy’s problem, and what drives him to his death, is that he is an inept seller, but inept people rarely realize they are thus. Willy believes that appearances and physical stamina are factors determining which people become rich and which people become poor. He lives by this philosophy and brought his boys up to believe in this too. Biff claimed to be the best player on his high school football team, but where did that get him in life? His skills alone would not get him into college, for that he needed grades. In contrast, Bernard, the son of Willy’s neighbor Charley, is not athletic but does well in his school work and becomes an individual in the upper class of society. In almost everything Willy has done in his life, he has been wrong. He was wrong about Biff being the best because Barnard surpassed anything Biff could have ever hoped to do. Willy could have tried to find his father with Ben and gotten rich in the process, but he decided not to search for his father who had abandoned him. Most importantly, Willy was wrong about wanting to become a salesman. Willy’s manual prowess is mentioned by Charley and Linda at various times in the play: “He was so wonderful with his hands.” Willy could have made a better living by installing ceilings for people, but he most likely viewed that as an occupation which was socially degrading, and he would not have that brought into his household. All of this sentiment is summed up nicely in the words of Biff and Charley in the Requiem: “[Willy] never knew who he was.”
A person’s ability to succeed in life is not attributed to luck or divine providence, but rather to the person’s willingness and proficiency to work in a field of their choosing. Willy made all the wrong decisions and choices. He chose to become a salesman. He decided that money was the only important thing in his life. Because of his wrong decisions, he ultimately ended up becoming a failure in life. His only noble gesture is his final one when he decides to take his life at an attempt to get money for Biff to use to start a business venture which will obviously fail due to the self-centeredness of the founders “The Loman Brothers.” In the end, Willy Loman failed to achieve his lifelong goal of becoming a rich, well-liked man in his community, and what drove him to madness and eventually to his demise was money.
The madness of Hamlet and Willy Loman finally lead them to their ultimate destiny: the destruction of themselves. By the end of each of the plays, Hamlet and Willy are in fantasy worlds. Here, they are not affected by anything that might happen. They simply do not care anymore. By examining both Hamlet and Willy Loman, the readers see that they are not completely mad but maybe disillusioned. There are times when they can be fine and times when the madness overtakes them. So in determining whether or not they are mad would be a difficult task. Although the cause of their madness differs, the end of both is the same.
