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social problem in Othello

Decent Essays

Suicide

Today one of the biggest social problems is suicide. The definition of suicide is the act of killing one’s self. The main reason why people commit suicide is that they believe they don’t have any hope and cannot overcome their negative situation. In the play “Othello” by William
Shakespeare, the protagonist Othello chooses to commit suicide because he cannot stand his situation and feels guilty over killing his wife Desdemona for misunderstanding her because of lago’s lie. Although Othello’s suicide wasn’t based on a true story, in today’s society suicide is one of the most prevalent forms of death. People cannot choose when they are born and when they can die and so Othello should have found other ways to cope with his …show more content…

He didn’t allow himself the time to go through all seven stages of grief and if he did, he might not have come to the same conclusion. The last and most important stage of the grieving process is acceptance and forgiveness. Acceptance causes people to find hope and a purpose for their life again. Committing suicide is considered selfish because it is an irresponsible act done because of temporary problems. Othello’s suicide is considered selfish by two literary critics. In Michael C. Andrew’s literary criticism titled “Othello: The Handkerchief Once More”, another critic T. S. Eliot says:
What Othello seems to be doing in making this speech is cheering himself up. He is endeavoring to escape reality, he has ceased to think about Desdemona, and is thinking about himself…Othello succeeds in turning himself in to a pathetic figure, by adopting an aesthetic rather than a moral attitude, dramatizing himself against his environment. He takes in the spectator, but the human motive is primarily to take in himself.

Eliot shows that Othello committed suicide only for himself and not for Desdemona or others because through his negative emotions and speech, he didn’t think about how his death could affect others. In the speech he said amongst an audience before he committed suicide, he lowered himself into a weak figure, in order to get sympathy. He could have committed suicide in private but instead he did it in front of an audience and dramatically killed himself with a

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