By not using the first person "I" in this soliloquy, Hamlet distances himself from the problem of suicide and tries to look at it objectively. This helps characterize him. We are discovering as the play unfolds that Hamlet is both a deeply emotional person, as can be seen is his grief over his father's death and his response to the ghost, and a highly analytical person. Hamlet is a scholar. He likes to stand back from a problem and logically examine it before he acts on it.
Since the ghost's revelation that he, the ghost, was murdered by Claudius, the world has become such a horrible place to Hamlet that he is trying to decide whether it is worthwhile to go on living. He weighs the "slings and arrows"—the wounds and pains of life—against the uncertainties of death. Looking at suicide objectively and as a universal problem, Hamlet decides that fear of the afterlife outweighs the misery of being alive.
This speech foreshadows the analytic way Hamlet will go about deciding on vengeance.
Hamlet not using the first person pronoun "I" emphasizes the universality of the feelings and problems he describes. He begins the soliloquy by wondering whether it is better to be alive or not. If one is alive, then one must bear bad luck and troubles, and death seems as though it mercifully would put an end to them all. However, we do not know what happens after death; we like to think that death would be like a long and peaceful sleep, but we cannot know what it is truly like, and so fear makes us hold on to life as long as we can. These concerns and feelings do not belong to Hamlet alone; he describes them as though they are much more universal in scope, something that so many individuals feel at some point in their lives. He is not alone in his thoughts about death and whether it would be better than his life. Lots of people wonder this same thing when they fall upon particularly difficult times.
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