We see Hamlet ride an emotional roller coaster filled with grief, shame, anger, depression, and self doubt. Hamlets "to be or not to be" soliloquy demonstrates all of Hamlet's emotions that he has been struggling with throughout the play. This soliloquy merely gives us a summation of these emotions in regards to his father's death, his mother's hasty remarriage, the ghost, and his own procrastination in seeking the revenge of his fathers murder.
In order for me to better understand what Hamlet was attempting to say within this soliloquy I had to put it into words I could better understand:
Hamlet: Do I really want to live? Should I go on like this,
Being miserable, and try to beat my enemies?
Or should I just kill myself and get it all over with?
Life sucks. I wish I were dead. Death is like a nice, long nap.
But what if I dream of really bad things?
It's definitely something to worry about.
If there wasn't anything to fear in the afterlife,
Why would anyone suffer through this miserable existence?
Why deal with life's troubles when it all could be solved with a dagger?
No reason...unless something bad might lie beyond the grave.
No one comes back from the dead to tell us what it's like,
So we go on living and being unhappy.
Man, I'm depressed. Ut Oh.... There's Ophelia!
What does the soliloquy mean, he is questioning his being. With feelings of emptiness within his existence he finds himself battling with suicidal thoughts, the fear of the beyond, and the aftermath he may have to deal with in the nether world if suicide truly is a mortal sin. Also, he is grappling with the difficulty of taking action against Claudius and the fact that he has not been able to revenge his father's murder yet.
"Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposi
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