Examples Of Ambition In Macbeth

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The Illness of Ambition Ambition is a strong desire to achieve something in life. A person without any ambition is like a boat without a rudder. Macbeth, written by Shakespeare, is a play, which refers to a character whose ambition takes over his conscience. Macbeth is a character who gradually changes over the course of the play due to the lust for power that his wife, Lady Macbeth, manipulated him into doing. A strong ambition for power caused Macbeth to make sinister decisions that only result in guilt, insanity, and despair. Guided by the prophecy of the three witches and the ambition of his wife, Macbeth lets his greed consume him, which causes him to feel guilty and leads him to madness. This guilty feeling gets into Macbeth's conscience, causing him to go insane and cause chaos. The first major sign of guilt is just before the murder of Duncan. His guilt materializes, in a hallucination, a dagger which Macbeth states in 2.1, “Is this a dagger i see before me, The handle toward my…show more content…
Macbeth goes to the side to talk to the murderer and the murderer tells Macbeth that “fleance is ‘scaped”. Due to Fleance escaping, Macbeth cannot be content with his power. It is not only the threat that Fleance's escape from death poses for Macbeth, but it is also the fact that the witches' predictions have verity. Now, for Macbeth "Nothing is what is not,"(1.3) and Macbeth's anxiety and paranoia increase, for if Fleance lives, so may Birnam Wood move. Macbeth's perception of reality and fantasy seem to merge now and as "blood will have blood,"(3.4.30-33) the more that Macbeth becomes mired in his bloody deeds, the more horrified and violent he becomes as the pressure to dissemble and to eliminate his enemies presses upon him. Macbeth then returns to the table to eat and finds the ghost of Banquo sitting in his spot. This is symbolic of the prophecy of Banquo's son Succeeding

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