자살과 문학, 그리고 셰익스피어

Abstract

Suicide has historically been considered a subject of fear and taboo. Literature, however, has seriously dealt with suicide as a form of death, the eternal enigma of human existence, even during the period when suicide was not permitted. Shakespeare also refers to suicide as a natural deed in a number of his works in spite of the social circumstances of his time when suicide was considered religiously a sin and legally wrong. Today, as suicide has been accepted as a general fact of modern society, suicide has become one of the most prominent interests in literature. As a result, various aspects of suicide—as an extreme method of expressing a main character’s frustration and despair, a tool for solving a variety of conflicts, an indication of resistance against irregularities and corruption in society, or a result of disease, etc.—have been endlessly reproduced in various works of literature. Though suicide in literature is fictional, it embraces various mechanisms of actual suicide. This leads to understanding and sympathy, instead of condemnation or criticism, as it symbolically represents existential problems originating from the agony of the period, irregularities and corruption in society, and frustration and despair due to damage to an individual’s value and dignity. This gains sympathy not only in modern literature, but also in the suicide of Shakespeare’s characters, more broadly, in Hamlet’s death.