We: The Losers

 

Hamlet was a loser and a hero. Faced with a shocking evil – the murder of his father by father’s own brother who marries the victim’s wife even before the mourning is over – Hamlet wavers between violent vindictiveness and philosophical inaction. He can raise a question like “To be or not to be?” and contemplate on it endlessly when the wretched life around him demands prompt and stern action. This young man who is insistent on proving his uncle’s guilt indubitably before wreaking vengeance can be impulsive too. He can draw his sword and drive it straight into the man hiding behind a screen without even bothering to find out the man’s identity and purpose of hiding. At one moment he can address his beloved Ophelia as a fair nymph and at the next he can hurl insulting questions on to her face: “Are you honest?” “Are you fair?”

Is Hamlet a real hero? He does not possess qualities that belong to people whom history venerates as heroes. Yet Hamlet has continued to enchant audiences for centuries. Why?

Geniuses like Shakespeare present Hamlet to us in such a way that we are fascinated. We are fascinated by his failures. His failures are our own potential failures. Hamlet and other such characters (Jude the Obscure or Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina) hold up a mirror – nay, a lens – to ourselves. We see our frailties in that mirror or through that lens. We are all losers in many ways. Our flaws and frailties are what Hamlet lives on the stage. Helplessly oftentimes. Is he a born loser? Is there a “tragic flaw” embedded in his DNA so that he cannot but fail?

Aren’t all of us similar to Hamlet one way or the other with our own flaws? Aren’t we failing again and again? It may not be a wicked uncle or a treacherous mother that jabs their boots into the ribs of our flaccid moral sense. It may be a corrupt government. It may be an exploitative system. It may be a neighbourhood thug. We keep sponging up the insults and humiliations and injustices. Since these are not usually directed specifically at us but at a whole society or community or the nation itself, it is easy for us to ignore them. But they are there. Always. And we are the losers because of that. Sometimes our losses may be more personal too.

Even if we don’t have the talent of a Sophocles or Shakespeare, we can tell the stories of our loss and error. We will redeem ourselves that way from the insult of an existence in a system that dehumanises us. More than that, if we learn to see other people as the great losers whose stories have not been discovered by a Shakespeare yet, they too will become heroes instead of ordinary losers. Losers are potential heroes too.

PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon.