Contrast to the Society



A Scene From Hamlet



Those were way too long. 57 minutes - I wouldn't say it was wasted down the drain, yet my attention span was brutally destroyed by the time I finished listening to them. The truth is, I did not get the drift of the audio at some parts, so I got some help from a friend's blog (Billy Coombs). For the most part I agree with his opinion - as a matter of fact I was going to start out my blog exactly how he wrote before I got hold of his post. Therefore, regardless of what he scribbled, I am going to write how I initially intended to write.

I have never killed anyone. I have killed many bugs, but I've never considered it a cruel murder. The good news is that I have stopped killing bugs since the day I learned the presence of big black moths in Colombia. My point is, it was hard for me to relate my personal experiences to these prisoners. Plus, I have never confronted such a huge dilemma like Hamlet - I have never jumped up and down around my house screaming "To be or not to be." Today's dilemma for me was to choose my lunch menu from Ceasar Salad to Taco, which is light compared to Hamlet's. In conclusion, Jay Park and Hamlet has almost no similarities. In other words, if I were to act the murder scenes from Hamlet, I would not get emotional as the prisoners who have prior experiences of committing a crime.

Who knows if I could have been a good friend of these prisoners if I hadn't know the fact that they were criminals? I want to approach this topic in a different method.

In spite of the fact that I could not relate the criminals reflections to my experiences, I was able to relate them to a scene in Hamlet. Hamlet orders his actors to act out a muder scene in front of Claudius to check his reaction, and surprisingly it works out perfectly as he intended (III, iii). Claudius, seeing the scene that evoked his memory, stops the play - and Hamlet is assured that the King had killed his father. As a criminal reflects "relate experience with Hamlet to that of the Missouri East Correctional Institution.", it is clear that their experiences have proven to affect their emotion significantly. I am glad I haven't gone through such disastrous activities so far, and I hope I get none in the future.