Macbeth vs. crime and punishment

             The worst crime one can possibly commit is murder. Murder is the unlawful killing of one human by another, usually premeditated. It is malice in its ultimate form. The legal punishment for murder is most often life imprisonment, ensuring the villain will never walk the streets again. In some cases, if the murder was truly horrific, the punishment can be death, ensuring the villain will never kill again. While these punishments are designed to cause immense suffering to the murderer, they do not even approach in magnitude the degree of suffering a murderer unleashes upon himself. This self inflicted punishment is known as guilt, remorseful awareness at having done something wrong. It is an inner struggle of morality. This concept of guilt is a common theme in many novels and written works as it applies to almost all aspects of everyday life. Guilt can arise from cheating on a test, breaking a window while playing a game of baseball, lying to a friend; it can arise anywhere and from anything. While many written works attempt to tackle the concept of guilt, there are very few authors bold enough to tackle the challenge of guilt following a murder. This stems from the difficulty of analyzing and describing the mind of a murderer. All authors have experienced guilt; they have lied in their lifetime, they have hurt someone's feelings. As they have experienced this guilt, they are able to write about it and describe it. However, having never experienced guilt stemming from murder, these authors are unable to grasp the emotional trauma caused by the crime. Because these authors have never murdered, they cannot easily make truthful convictions about a murderer's frame of mind. There are, however, a few literary gems that are accurately able to describe the mind of a murderer. The most famous and well known of these are Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and William Shakespeare's Macbeth.
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