"For there is nothing good or bad except thought does it" (2.2, 249-250)Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay From the very beginning of Shakespeare's Hamlet, it's clear that much of the action is cerebral. The play never leaves the confines of Hamlet's head. We never know whether Hamlet's madness is real or artificial, or whether his mother's intentions are adulterous or innocent. This is because Hamlet's interpretation of events is the dominant voice in the play. He states that there is no meaning outside of thought "it is thought that makes it so" because one's thoughts and opinions are the sole arbiters of "good or evil" . The action in Samuel Delany's The Tale of Gorgik is also limited to the protagonist's interpretation of his world. Gorgik's narrative involves his struggle to constantly read and interpret the alien world of court life. Both Hamlet and Gorgik must rely on their evolving sense of action around them to navigate social contexts. Their social navigation is analogous to the reader's experience of browsing a text. Their interpretive positions affect the action of the play just as the reader's interpretation creates the meaning of a text. A symptom of Gorgik and Hamlet's social navigation is that both are intensely involved in the worlds in which they operate. They must both interpret and remain involved, despite their ignorance of the rules of the world. However, in Gorgik's case, Delany points out that it is a lack of knowledge that allows him to be so close to his new world. But in his ignorance, young Gorgik was even closer to the lords and ladies around him than an equally young potter could have been. were. Because it is precisely at its center that we lose the clear vision of what surrounds, of what controls and circumvents each statement, decides and develops each action, just as the bird has no clear notion of the 'air, although it supports it at every turn, or the fish. no real water vision, although it blurs everything she sees. (52) Gorgik's ignorance allows him to thrive in the world because he is not seen as a threat. He is “closer to the lords and ladies” than an educated foreigner would have been. This is because his interpretive position is an innocent observation. His ignorance gives him intimacy with the players on the field. He is therefore part of the world but not of the world. He must interpret and read their actions but is too close to the center, too involved in the world to clearly see its workings. He is the bird and the fish who have no knowledge of the environment through which they travel. He is unaware of his medium but is nonetheless able to navigate it successfully. As he has “no clear vision of his surroundings,” he relies on his observations to obtain meaning. There is no outside information and Gorgik's own interpretation is the only option available. This is the experience of readers who, instead of possessing the supposed distance and knowledge of the apprentice, are instead intensely involved in the text they absorb as it becomes part of their world. The reader must work their way through a text by becoming part of the world within it, but in doing so they become part of its world. The text becomes an integral part of its context of interpretation and it approaches the center and therefore the meaning that resides in it. She must blur the distinction between herself and the text until the text, like the bird in the air, "supports her at every turn" and ceases to bea foreign world. Stanley Fish asserts that in the act of reading, one never possesses a vision outside of oneself. personal context. In “Is there a text in this class?” » he reasons that “communication occurs within situations and that to be in a situation is already to be in possession of (or to be possessed by) a structure of hypotheses; it is in the hypothesis of these goals and objectives that the entire statement is immediately understood” (583). A reader has an “assumption structure” that colors his or her interpretation of the text. These hypothesis structures form its context and its context is the way in which it receives a text. The reader cannot be separated from It is a symbiotic relationship with the reader owning and being “possessed by” these assumptions. Therefore, all interpretation, whether Gorgik's reading of his world or the reader's analysis of a text, depends on the "structure of the interpreter." hypotheses. » The reader's "thought makes it so" to the extent that his interpretation is the meaning of the text. Gorgik's social navigation differs from Hamlet's in Gorgik's choice of interpretive stance. He is not quick to evaluate the meaning of what he sees. He evaluates to what extent this allows him to survive. Because he does not pretend to know the motivations behind what he sees, he is able to remain in favor of royalty and is more successful than Hamlet in navigating his world as he changes his interpretation. as he moves forward as Hamlet claims to know the truth of what he sees. Yet he still sees the situation with his paranoid point of view. This choice of static interpretation is demonstrated by Hamlet's inability to kill the king while he is praying. Hamlet comes up against the final act of the play. It has consumed him from the start of the game and yet, faced with opportunity, he cannot do it. He has the opportunity, but he lacks a definitive interpretation of what his action will mean. He reads the act differently from the king and thus convinces himself that the time has not come. “Am I then avenged/To take him in the purging of his soul/When he is fit and prepared for his passage?” No” (3.3, 84-87). He sees the King asking for forgiveness and receiving it, while the King interprets his own actions very differently: “My words fly away, my thoughts remain below/Words without thoughts never go to heaven” (3, 3 , 97-98). The king believes he does not have enough concentration and remorse to receive forgiveness. The audience is led to believe that if Hamlet had killed Claudius, he would have died unforgiven. Hamlet loses his opportunity for revenge because he stops to decide the meaning of the situation. If placed in the same situation, Gorgik would have killed Claudius because he would not have hesitated to judge the true meaning of Claudius' action. Gorgik's interpretive position is not to claim to know while Hamlet must constantly remind everyone that he is the only one who knows. what is happening. Immediately after killing Polonius, he launches a tirade lambasting his mother for what he condemned as adulterous behavior: “Sit down/And let me wring your heart; for I will/If it is made of penetrable material? proof and bulwark against common sense” (3.4, 34-37). He scolds her and claims to offer “proof” of her sin. He takes the liberty of chastising his mother's actions because he claims to be the judge of right and wrong when he simply interprets everything through his prism of emotional turmoil. The play is affected by the dominant voice of Hamlet's justice. Likewise, Gorgik's also affects his world. In Gorgik's case, however, the affect is more subtle and perhaps more influential. While Hamlet's inability to interpret works against him, Gorgik's method of moving in and out of context.