Connection: Hamlet and The Pact

The play Hamlet has a question that is reinforced time and time again throughout the play. The question "To be or not to be", as Hamlet the main character puts it is a question that has poped up in various works of literature, one of them being The Pact by Jodi Piccoult. The Pact is a book about two young people who have known each other for their whole lives and have been in love for as long as they can remember. They spent every waking moment with each other and one day, the girl decides that she has gotten everything she wants out of life and that she wanted to kill herself. She decided that she wanted her boyfriend to be there when she did it, so that he would be the last person she saw. Whether it was on purpose or not, when the police showed up, it looked like the boyfriend shot her and she did not commit suicide.
In the play Hamlet, the main character also ends up killing himself (although it was in a more non-direct way). The two main characters of these works of literature both dealt with the question "to be or not to be" and they both chose to end their misery on earth. Both of the characters had been corrupted not only by society in general, but by the people that they loved the most. Hamlet had been forced to reconsider his being and human nature in general when his father was killed by his uncle and the girl in The Pact was corrupted by her boyfriend, who made her realize that there was nothing more to live for. The one difference between the two characters is that in the play Hamlet, Shakespeare made it obvious how much Hamlet was sufferring and the reason for his demise, whereas in the The Pact, Piccoult left out several details about the girl until the end of the book, making it a sort of mystery.
This connection is really interesting, but it involves two characters that are almost complete opposites, that end up doing the exact same thing. The decision to off themselves is very interesting because it shows how there isn't exactly one type of person that has suicidal thoughts and that even though a person may look happy on the surface, in reality, they are miserable. It's interesting because it shows how fake our world is. Both of the characters were opposite people when it came to their public and private lives and they seperated the two as if to form two different personalities for each person. By doing this, it showed that neither of them truly knew who they were and their true identity and this is the core reason why they decided to escape from this world. This reason created a sense of self loathing and uselessness that none of them could escape from.