"To be or not to be?" It is an unanswered question, composed of a single verb – to be – and a negative. What does it mean to be? And why doesn't this question have an answer? To fiddle with these things would be foolhardy, to attempt to answer even more. Yet it seems right to try. Death and life have always been topics of debate among people, openly or silently, sitting in church pews or standing next to an unmarked grave. We all live and we all die. What happens in between and why does it happen? Voltaire and Shakespeare answered this question and both gave very different answers. Which was correct? Or are they both wrong? Is Hamlet's dilemma really an unanswered question? And where does this take us, those who do not live the centuries between the pages of a book? Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Hamlet is a problematic figure to say the least. Her father is dead, murdered by her uncle, who is now her stepfather and the king. He has lost any foothold he might have had in this world: the ground has been pulled from under his feet, and we readers are there to watch him fall, to watch him try to pick up the pieces of an upended life. As readers, we are and have been linked for centuries to the tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark and the fate of its protagonist. But what is his appeal as a character? He is not particularly brave or witty, kind or even good. Perhaps in his we see some semblance of our lives reversed, perhaps we find his monologued introspections a mirror of our own, or perhaps he forces us to reflect for a moment. outside where we feel comfortable. “To be or not to be,” he says. Exist, live. Or die. Faced with his rapidly changing life, his vision of the future is dim. Why, he asks, “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” when you can “take up arms against a sea of ​​problems and, by opposing them, put an end to them?” What keeps him, and us, from the “naked body” that would put an end to everything we stumble upon here? Hamlet reduces our reluctance to fear and cowardice. “Dying, sleeping,” he says, “sleeping, perhaps dreaming: yes, that is the problem, because in that sleep of death what dreams can come”? We don't know what will happen next, and neither does Hamlet, and it is this uncertainty that keeps us bound to our lives here, this "fear of something after death... which confuses the will and makes us prefer to endure those evils we have rather than fly to others that we don't know." Voltaire, in the form of his Crone in Candide, has a different answer to Hamlet's question. This old woman had an equally hard life, and was even worse off than Hamlet, as she had lost her family, her position, her beauty, and half her behind, among other things. Although Voltaire was not intentionally answering Hamlet's question, posed about a century and a half before the publication of Candide, he was writing to contradict another writer's more recent statement: that "whatever is, is right" (Pope). But by denying a statement like this, Voltaire asked and answered the question: why do bad things happen? And his immensely unhelpful but painfully true response: They just do it. What then is Candide's point? You could say that it is an exploration of the purpose of life. And in this sense, Voltaire's characters, who suffer immensely at his omniscient hands, all ask themselves the question that Hamlet asked himself: why not "remove these mortal remains"? Why “want to continually carry a weight that you can then always throw off? to detest existence and yet cling to one's existence? In short,”.