How?

A connection between three texts with a common theme of how?

Hello and welcome to my fourth blog. Here, you will read about the common theme of disbelief in the texts: Hamlet, Station Eleven, and The Story of an Hours

"How?"

Observing the many texts I have read, a common theme that peaked my interest between three specific stories was disbelief. Disbelief can be defined as the “inability or refusal to accept that something is true or real”. This theme was most evident in the stories: Hamlet, Station Eleven, and The Story of an Hour.

The play, Hamlet, is an infamous play where the protagonist has a constant “thirst” to avenge his murdered father by trying multiple times to assassinate his Uncle Claudius. But this fury only arises because of Hamlet’s disbelief that his father, whom he loved so dearly, was dead. On top that, moments later, suddenly Hamlet is again enraged by the marriage between his mother and uncle that suddenly “slaps” him in the face. These factors cause Hamlet to become “mad” and not think very clearly because of his disbelief that his life had trembled and fallen so quickly like a domino effect.

In the novel, Station Eleven, a pandemic transpires that wipes out the majority of the population only leaving a minimal number of survivors. Thinking about the collapse in this novel makes you think to yourself, how would you react in this circumstance? If I were to picture myself going through this tremendous change, I would probably feel like it was just a dream and that in a few minutes, I would snap back into reality. But for the many survivors like Kirsten, Jeevan, and Clark, figuring a new way to live was their new-found reality. Throughout the novel, disbelief was again another huge theme that struck their new nation and acted like a whiplash that swept away everything they once had.

Although, The Story of an Hour, was a much more shortened story compared to Hamlet and Station Eleven, repeated is the theme of disbelief. This short story reads about a woman that feels she is suffocated by her husband as society deems that woman cannot live without a man. From her contradicting beliefs, the woman has a slight moment of disbelief that her husband had just died, but later breaks out of it and praises this fact. But when she shortly realizes that the news was false, again a sense of disbelief occurs as her excitement she had felt, diminished right before her eyes in seconds. This disbelief causes her to be so shocked and dies momentarily because of it.

All-in-all, these three texts had very different plots that caused the many disbeliefs that the characters had to endure. All of them asking the same question with the same beginning word: how?

How could no one care?

How could this have happened?

How did he die?

All these questions; a result of disbelief.

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Additional Links

http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/full.html

https://archive.org/details/StationElevenEmilySt.JohnMandel

https://my.hrw.com/support/hos/hostpdf/host_text_219.pdf