Why Hamlet? What about Hamlet makes people read it? Why is it part of the canon?

Even if Hamlet is a reflection of subjectivity by making it so that each person interprets it

different, why does that matter?

We came to the realization that Hamlet purposefully leaves the audience with
unanswered questions to acknowledge the constant search for objective truth in a
subjective world.
What I want to say: how experience Hamlet almost like a map to understanding it if think about
experience alonestart reading and start making assumptions about events, characters, etc., fill
in gaps of the plot and story/narrative and verify our own conclusions; look back and realize that
not solid evidence for one experience or anotherleft up to interpretation because each persons
opinion can be validated by pulling out different parts of the story and putting bias onto them.
Like in political debates/arguments when people can pull out different statistics/data to validate
their opinion on an issue but difficult to account for all data and make one opinion clearly more
correct than another. Everything is grey in the end, when it comes to bigger issues/debates that
call for opinion or morals theres not one right answer. Can pull out different things to support
one view but cant truly look at it holistically and objectivelypeoples experiences will make
them see it as one answer or another. With Hamlet, full of themes and ideas that can be argued
multiple different ways, and purposeful omission of character details and plot details to verify
peoples opinions makes it so a definite opinion cannot be made on the play besides the fact that
multiple conclusions/meanings can be drawn from it. Part of the reason the play is so valuable
and important is that people can find themselves in it. Comes back to reading and why people
love to readanything youre looking for you can find in Hamlet/relate to play since reflect
experiences onto it and they reflect back to you. No matter what stage in life, will read it
somewhat differently and get something different out of it. It will support whatever conclusions
you can come to about it. At the same time, read to gain experiences and empathy and
understanding, so can read it to be looking for that and find yourself entering into moral debates
and questions that must reach own conclusions on and decide whats bad and good since
Shakespeare will not provide you the answers. Good books in some ways leave you guessing
present a question or idea and dont tell you what to think about it. Guide you in certain ways by
controlling agency to think about it from certain points of view/lenses, but at the same time
overall purpose to not have a definite conclusion or the reading would be too easy, it would not
pull you in and keep you there, like a poem that does not unravel itself the first or second time
around.
Is literature a mirror or a window?
Windows frame our fundamental lack of control

Windows are, in this sense, a powerful existential tool: a patch of the world,
arbitrarily framed, from which we are physically isolated. The only thing you can
do is look. You have no influence over what you will see.
A blob of mist balances on top of a mountain; leafless trees contort themselves in
slow-motion interpretive dance; heavy raindrops make the puddles boil. These
things are a tiny taste of the bigness of the world. They were there before you
looked; they will be there after you go. None of it depends on you.

But this is the power of windows: They contradict your easy assumptions. They
scribble over your mental cartoons with the heavy red pen of reality.
Purpose: Hamlet uses phenomenological experience of its reading to create a play where every
reading of it results in a new adaptation.
Unwritten part of text stimulates imagination, leading reader to shade in outlines suggested by
given situations so take on reality of their own.
Phenomenological analysis: how sequent sentences act upon one anotherpeople interpret
sentences as correlatives so sentences aim at something beyond what they actual say and act as
purveyors of informationforeshadow whats to come with specific content. Start process out of
which emerges content of text itself. Starts to open horizon of interpretation but continuously
modified expectationschanges significance of what read.
HAMLET: questions that we try to answer but continue reading and keep finding different
possible answers.
Whatever we have read sinks into memory, can be brought back and set against different
backgroundreader makes hitherto unforeseeable connectionsmemory can never reassume its
original shape. New background brings to light new aspects of what committed to memory.
Reader by establishing inter-relations between past, present, and future causes text to reveal
potential multiplicity of connections.
Activity of reading can be characterized as kaleidoscope of perspectives, pre-intentions, and
recollections. Each sentence is a window to the next and last.
Whole process represents fulfillment of the potential, unexpressed reality of the text, but it is to
be seen only as a framework for a great variety of means by which the virtual dimension may be
brought into being.
Only through inevitable omissions a story gains its dynamism. When flow of story interrupted
and we are led off in unexpected directions, opportunity is given to us to bring imagination into
play to establish connections and fill in gaps left by the text itselfwe become story teller.
Gaps have different effect on process of anticipation and retrospection because can be filled in
different waysreason that one text is potentially capable of several different realizations and no
one reading can exhaust full potential, for each reader will fill gaps in own way, excluding
various other possibilities. As read, make own decision to how gap is filled. By doing so,
acknowledging inexhaustibility of the text that forces decision to be made in first place.
Reading process always involves viewing text through a perspective that is continually on the
move, linking up the different phases, and so constructing virtual dimension (b/c second readings
show different light on different things). When finish text and read again, knowledge will result
in different time sequenceestablish connections by referring to our awareness of what is to
come and so certain aspects of text become significant we did not see first reading.
Reader links different phases together and will always form virtual dimension which transforms
text into an experience for the reader. Way in which experience comes about through process of
continual modification akin to way we gather experience in life.
Remember that impressions that come out of this process are within limits imposed by written
not unwritten text. Written part of text gives us knowledge, unwritten part gives us opportunity to
picture things; without elements of indeterminacy, gaps in text, cannot use imagination.

Reader strives to fit everything together and group together all different aspects of text to form
consistencystriving to fit into consistent pattern.
Several interpretations because meaning comes out of interaction between written text and
individual mind of reader with own particular history of experience, own consciousness, and
own outlook.
Details may appear to contradict one another and so simultaneously stimulate and frustrate our
ability to picture and thus continually cause our imposed gestalt of the text to disintegrate.
Without formation of illusions, unfamiliar world of the text would remain unfamiliar; through
illusions, experience offered by the text becomes accessible for us, for only illusion on its
different levels of consistency makes experience readable. If cannot find or impose
consistency, sooner or later put text down. Process is hermeneutic. Text provokes expectations
we project back on the text so that we reduce polysemantic possibilities to a single interpretation
in keeping with expectations aroused, thus extracting an individual, configurative meaning.
Polysemantic nature of text and illusion-making of reader are opposed factors. If illusion
complete, polysemantic nature vanishes, if polysemantic nature all-powerful, illusion would be
totally destroyed. Always find balance between two conflicting tendencies. Incompleteness gives
formation of illusions its productive value.
As we read, oscillate between building and breaking of illusions. Organize and reorganize
various data offered by text, given factors/fixed points we base our interpretation on, trying to fit
them together in the way we think the author meant them to be fitted.
Moment we try to impose consistent pattern on the text, discrepancies arise which are reverse
side of interpretive coin, and by existing they draw us into the text, compelling us to conduct a
creative examination not only of the text but also of ourselves.
Reading reflects the process by which we gain experience (ctd. Page 64)
Identification of the reader with what he reads; identification is the establishment of affinities
between oneself and someone outside oneselfa familiar ground on which we are able to
experience the unfamiliar.
Herein lies the dialectical structure of reading. The production of the meaning of literary texts
which we discussed in connection with forming the gestalt of the textdoes not merely entail
the discovery of the unformulated, which can then be taken over by the active imagination of the
reader; it also entails the possibility that we may formulate ourselves and so discover what had
previously seemed to elude our consciousness. These are the ways in which reading literature
gives us the chance to formulate the unformulated.