- Describe a conflict in the text. Explain how the conflict helped you understand human nature.
INTRO: Macbeth is a play that resolves around a character who has an internal conflict between his own ambition and morality through the entire play. His name is Macbeth and he was once a respected warrior but due to his ambition, he made irrational choices that ultimately led him to losing both his mind and humanity. The inner conflicts in Macbeth’s mind shows us that human nature is complex and if our emotions are left unbalanced, we can be led to dark places. As the play progresses Macbeth continues to go in a downward spiral until coming to his demise at the end of the play. His downfall happened primarily because of the conflict between his morals and ambition. The three witches, the dagger and the apparitions were events that Macbeth came across and they all contributed towards Macbeth’s conflict of ambition and morality.
PARAGRAPH 1: The witches were the first phenomenon to come up in the play. Macbeth stumbled upon these three witches and they foretold his future of him becoming king. Macbeth became blinded by the idea of power & riches. His ambition for it grew and his human integrity shrunk. “Stars, hide your fires! Let not light see my black and deep desires” This quote shows that Macbeth wants to kill King Duncan so he can go to power, he understands that in doing so he would be a bad person, he hopes that no one finds out about his villainous plans. During this point in the play his inner conflicts are to whether he should go along with murdering Duncan or not.
PARAGRAPH 2: He continues to go along with his plan of murdering Duncan. Moments before a dagger appears. This dagger is a hallucinatory object which reinforces his conflict between his ambition and human integrity. “A dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?” Macbeth is saying that he believes he is hallucinating because of the conflict and stress in his mind. Not only does the dagger symbolise the internal conflicts in Macbeth but it also symbolises betrayal. Macbeth and duncan are cousins. Macbeth’s ambition took over & he went on to murder Duncan to take his place as king. When he became king he was merely unsatisfied. “Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown” This quote identifies that although Macbeth achieved his desire of becoming king, he isn’t happy. This directly relates to the understanding of human nature. We as humans will never be satisfied with the goals we accomplish. This is because we are built to evolve thus we must always have a goal to strive towards. In this case Macbeth achieved becoming king but he isn’t satisfied as he is guilty that he killed a man for power and riches and more problems have arisen due to his choice of commiting murder.
CONCLUSION: The beginning of Macbeth’s downfall was in the three witches. They were the cause of his conflict of ambition and morality which led him on to making little-thought decisions. This play was a series of chained reactions which ultimately caused his death at the end. The play showed that when your humanity and morality is outweighed by your intentions you can lose your sanity. Human nature is very unique as our brains are complex thus we can quite easily distort ourselves by having conflictions in our heads.
40mins.
Hi Quinn,
Great to see you putting time in to prepare so far ahead of the assessment date!
This is really interesting work. My main advice is to make sure you very explicitly bring the idea of conflict into each paragraph.
In paragraph 1, the conflict is between his inner desires and his morals.
In paragraph 2, you do a better job of exploring the conflict. In fact, you do a GREAT job of exploring the internal conflict – but again, to be sure, I’d make sure I used the actual words internal conflict as part of the explanation.
Try making those changes and letting me have a look at the piece again.
CW