Importance of Stories in Shakespeare's Hamlet and Thomas King’s The Truth About Stories Essay Example

Stories have always been an important aspect of humanity. Since the moment you were born to the day you die, you have told and heard fiction and non-fiction. We continue to tell stories because of the power they hold and the impression they make throughout society. The theme of a story is very dynamic. Examples of this are Shakespeare's Hamlet and Thomas King’s The Truth About Stories. In the play Hamlet, Shakespeare explores the characters of Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, and Ophelia, as they navigate their way through the hardships of their own elegiac journey. In The Truth About Stories, Thomas King expresses that stories are "all that we are" and that they can be dangerous (King, 2). The power of a story establishes a prevailing theme in The Truth About Stories and Hamlet. This essay will analyze three fundamental concepts: societal constrictions can make one unable to tell their own story; how you tell stories creates influential opinions; and the danger behind a story.

In the fourth chapter of The Truth About Stories, "A Million Porcupines Crying in the Dark," Thomas King compares Native literature to European literature. King brings forward the divisive issue of the Canadian-American border, stating that "the border doesn’t mean that much to the majority of Native people in either country. It is, after all. A figment of someone else’s imagination." (King, 102). King is expressing that the border is an imaginary line drawn by the oppressors of the Indigenous; trapping and alienating those who lived there before anybody else. Like Thomas King and the majority of Native people, Ophelia feels trapped. Ophelia is Hamlet’s love interest. She has a controlling brother and father, Laertes and Polonius, who make heartbreaking decisions for her. As Laertes prepares to leave for France, he makes Ophelia pledge to stay away from Hamlet: "Farewell, Ophelia, and remember well / What I have said to you," to which Ophelia responds, "'Tis in my memory lock'd, / And you yourself shall keep the key of it" (1.3 25; 84-87). This exchange of farewells illustrates that Laertes has authority over Ophelia. In the next act, Hamlet mistakingly murders Polonius, leaving Ophelia to become deranged. Ophelia’s identity was her father, and when he died, she lost herself. Ophelia was unable to speak her own story due to the surrounding misogynistic male figures in her life.

Shakespeare uses a ghost to represent Hamlet's dead father. In the first act of the play, the ghost of King Hamlet informs Prince Hamlet of his death and how Claudius killed him. Hamlet understood that if he went proclaiming that Claudius was a murderer, no one would believe him, so he writes a play to uncover the true story of the King's death called The Mouse-trap. The people of Denmark learn the narrative for themselves when they watch this play. This storytelling strategy influences people's perspectives because they feel they formed their own opinions when, in reality, their beliefs were fabricated in Hamlet’s favor. Thomas King talks about two creation stories in chapter one of The Truth About Stories, one Native and one Christian. The Native creation story takes 11 pages to depict in full, while the Christian genesis story takes only one. King admits that he applies different strategies in telling these stories: "In the Native story, I tried to [...] craft the story in terms of a performance for a general audience. In the Christian story, I tried to maintain a sense of rhetorical distance [...] while organizing the story for a knowledgeable gathering" which, "suggest values that may be neither inherent nor warranted," (King, 22). By taking the time to thoroughly create an image in your mind, King makes his non-aboriginal readers more appreciative of the Indigenous story. Instead of comparing the two stories, he highlights contrasts that support his point of view in an attempt to persuade readers.

In the last few pages of Hamlet, a plethora of the main characters die, notably; Claudius, Laertes, Gertrude, and Hamlet. Just as all the action has faded, Horatio - Hamlet’s closest friend - begs to sip the poisoned wine that had murdered Gertrude moments before. Hamlet insists that Horatio not die since he is the only one who can deliver the truthful story about what has occurred. "Give me the cup: let go; by heaven, I’ll have it / [...] / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, / To tell my story." (5.2 91; 351-357) Hamlet is encouraging Horatio to tell the truth, so that the people of Denmark and Prince Fortinbras will remember Hamlet for his heroic acts rather than his madness. When Fortinbras replies with recognition when Horatio informs him of Hamlet's death, he proclaims, "Let four captains / Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage; / For he was likely, had had been put on, / To have prov’d most royally," meaning, if Hamlet had been given the opportunity to be King, he would have prospered (5.3 92; 405-408). Stories, according to Thomas King, can be dangerous since "A story told one way could cure, that the same story told another way could injure," (King, 92). This argument has many parallels to Hamlet, considering that if Horatio had consumed the wine and died, someone else would have told Fortinbras, perhaps changing how people perceived Hamlet in the end.

We observe stories play a prominent part and have a certain importance in Shakespeare's Hamlet and Thomas King's The Truth About Stories, across all the acts, scenes, chapters, characters, and dialogue. How stories may constrain the innocent, convince readers, and persuade perspectives. Thus, stories have relevance and significance because they do more than just reflect society; they shape it.