An Interpretation Of Macbeth From The Angle Of Death Instinct

Of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies, Macbeth is the most frightening one. The whole work is filled with a chilling atmosphere of death. Murders, assassinations, massacres, suicide, and other destructive behaviors are throughout the whole story. Meanwhile, Macbeth’s transformation from a hero to a devil also makes countless people sigh with regrets. From the perspective of Freud, Macbeth’s destructive behaviors are directly related to human beings’ innate death instinct.This paper, employing Freud’s death instinct theory, focuses on the analysis of three aspects of death instinct: external aggression, internalized self-aggression and repetitive behaviors. External aggression includes violence, destruction, war and other destructive behaviors; internalized self-aggression includes self-accusation, self-abuse and suicide; repetitive behaviors behave as the compulsion to repeat the unpleasant experiences. The death instinct of Macbeth is also manifested in the three aspects above: the murder of king Duncan, the assassination of Banquo and the slaughter of Macduff’s wife and son are outer manifestation of external aggression; the self-accusation and sense of guilt due to death of Duncan and Banquo, and death on the battlefield are internal performances of internalized self-aggression; both behaviors of external aggression and internalized self-aggression show the compulsion to repeat. Under the powerful attack of death instinct, Macbeth’s defense mechanism employs narcissism and self-deception to protect self, however, these two immature defense mechanisms fail to provide a veritable protection for Macbeth’s upcoming self collapse.The death instinct theory is used into analysis of mental process of Macbeth so as to search for the root cause of Macbeth’s transformation from hero to death. The paper, by in-depth study of Macbeth, probes into the incentives of death instinct, under whose drives Macbeth, dealing with the conflicts between inner world and outer world, conducts a series of murder, assassination and slaughter and other external aggressive behaviors, the will to destroy, however, that has not been weakened even when Macbeth eventually takes the throne, has turned into Macbeth himself, which results in struggle in self-accusation and guilt. Finally, he still acts as a hero to die through fighting on the battlefield. For Macbeth who severely suffers from the sense of guilt and hopelessness, death is not dreadful any longer. Death is a full stop for Macbeth to release all sufferings and uproars in his life and for Macbeth, death is a self protection and salvation as well.