to avenge his father's murder and reclaim the rightful place on the throne fromClaudius. However, it seems to him like his duty to kill Claudius and reclaim the throne is rather drastic, and he ponders the guilt he might feel for taking these dramatic steps.

Beyond that, however, his religious beliefs prevent him from committing murder. He wants desperately to follow God, but his familial responsibilities are urging him to kill Claudius. In the end, he does kill Claudius but himself dies in the act—the decision was his overall undoing.

Prince Hamlet's dilemma concerns his difficult decision to avenge his father's death by murdering his uncle, King Claudius. Toward the beginning of the play, Hamlet is visited by his father's ghost, and King Hamlet explains how Claudius poisoned him in the orchard and instructs Hamlet to avenge his death. Initially, Hamlet vows to avenge his father but hesitates to murder Claudius because he is unsure if the ghost was actually telling the truth or simply the devil attempting to doom his spirit.

Before Hamlet confirms that Claudius committed regicide, he contemplates committing suicide during his famous soliloquy in act 3, scene 1. Hamlet struggles with the decision to commit suicide because he fears that he will doom his soul and is afraid of the great unknown. Even after Hamlet confirms that Claudius murdered his father, he continues to hesitate and passes on the perfect opportunity to assassinate Claudius while he is praying. Hamlet refrains from killing his uncle because he does not want Claudius's spirit to ascend to heaven. Hamlet's hesitation, indecision, and reluctance to avenge his father's death leads to the tragic outcome of the play when the entire royal family is murdered during a fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes.

The title character of Shakespeare's tragedyHamlet is caught in a state of indecision. The main dilemma that Hamlet faces if of deciding what to do.

His father, the king, is dead. His mother is remarried to his father's brother. A specter that appears to be his father's ghost has told him that this same brother, Hamlet's uncle Claudius, is the one who killed him. To avenge his father, Hamlet will have to kill his uncle. But without any further proof of Claudius's crimes, Hamlet is reluctant to commit regicide and potentially jeopardize his country. There is no right choice, so how can he choose?

Over the course of the play, Hamlet delivers seven soliloquies, during which he is alone on stage and offering the audience a window into his deeply conflicted mental state. Each of these monologues express Hamlet's indecision to one degree or another, the most famous of course being "To be or not to be," in which Hamlet debates the merits of even staying alive at all.

Hamlet's central dilemma is how to avenge his father without further harming his country or the people he loves. While he could exclusively blame his uncle, Claudius, for killing his father (also named Hamlet), the fact remains that his mother, Gertrude, married Claudius only a few months after her first husband's death. Hamlet must wonder if his mother was complicit in the murder itself. He loves his mother, but his moral standards push him to include her in his revenge.

These qualms play out in his indecisiveness. He alternates between carrying out the complicated plan he has set in motion to trap Claudius ("catch the conscience of a king") and worrying so much about the consequences that he can take no further steps ("lose the name of action").

This dilemma plagues him so much that he contemplates suicide as a way to avoid committing murder ("To be or not to be . . .")—not a real solution as it would substitute one sin for another.

Like Shakespeare’s other tragic heroes (Macbeth, Othello, Brutus, and Lear), Hamlet is destroyed not by circumstances but by a flaw in his own character. Introspective and indecisive, he is unable to function effectively as he struggles with a conflict that defies a solution consistent with his sense of honor and morality and with the expectations of his society. Hamlet is honor-bound to avenge the murder of King Hamlet. As the prince of Denmark, he cannot ignore regicide, the most heinous of crimes, and he cannot accept the presence of a usurper on the Danish throne. Additionally, as a son, he must avenge his father’s murder; Hamlet’s rage—and the mores of his society—demand revenge. His course of action seems clear: he must kill the vile Claudius. Hamlet’s religious faith, however, makes his course of action anything but clear, since it forbids murder. Ensnared by his social position, the demands of his conscience, the demands of society, the canons of his faith, and his own thirst for justice, Hamlet is trapped. Even suicide offers no escape, since “self-slaughter” is also a mortal sin. When Hamlet agonizes, “To be or not to be--that is the question,” he finds no acceptable answer.

To let Claudius live is morally wrong, but to kill him is morally wrong, too, and a threat to Hamlet’s own soul. Consequently, Hamlet thinks rather than acts, torturing himself with memories of his beloved father and thoughts of his mother’s incestuous marriage to Claudius. He examines his own conscience, observes and evaluates his own behavior and the behavior of others, and seizes upon one reason after another to delay resolving his dilemma. Hamlet cannot let Claudius escape justice, but he will not act decisively, choosing instead to pursue various clever schemes through which he convinces himself for a while that he is moving toward a solution. Ultimately, Hamlet’s dilemma is resolved, but its resolution is not the consequence of careful thought or personal introspection. When he watches his mother die and Claudius’s plot to kill him is revealed, Hamlet’s indecision ends abruptly. He kills Claudius and then dies.

Hamlet’s dilemma is whether and how to kill King Claudius after learning that Claudius killed his father, married his mother, and took the throne of Denmark. The entire play revolves around this dilemma and the moral questions that it raises.

Those moral questions raised by Hamlet’s dilemma are numerous, and create much of the actual conflict of the play. Hamlet's mind is preoccupied by the angst of mortality and questions of how vengeance and justice are similar, but distinct. For example, Hamlet is presented with a perfect opportunity to kill King Claudius while he prays. However, Hamlet knows that killing someone while they pray lets them go to heaven, so he refuses to follow through because he wants Claudius to go to hell, instead.

This is a question that has been written about and argued about for centuries. Why doesn't Hamlet just go ahead and kill King Claudius as he promises the ghost of his father and as he repeatedly promises himself to do? On the one hand, he wants to commit murder, but on the other hand, he can't bring himself to act. His problem or dilemma seems to be, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, that he thinks too much. After all, Shakespeare establishes that Hamlet has been a student for many years and that he still, at the age of thirty, wants to go back to Wittenberg to continue his studies. He is an intellectual, a student, not a man of action and not a killer, but he has had a terrible problem forced upon him. He will act vigorously and decisively in the heat of passion, before he has had a chance to think--as when he single-handedly boards the pirate ship--but his thinking inhibits his ability to act because it inhibits his ability to feel murderous anger. At the end of the play he still hasn't brought himself to killing Claudius and probably wouldn't have done so even then if he hadn't gotten so emotionally aroused by several factors: the heated duel with Laertes, his discovery that he had been stabbed with a poisoned foil, and Laertes' revelation that the King was responsible for the plot against his life.

The will to act becomes the crux of Hamlet's dilemma.  From this, Shakespeare is able to weave a powerful portrait of what the individual does when they are besieged with information, impulses, and condition that are devoid of totality to tell them what to do.  Hamlet is confronted with the death of his father, needing to take revenge, and embracing a path beyond his capacity. This state of being is where Hamlet's paralysis lies.  He is a character that is poised between equally challenging courses of action in which there can be no permutation.  

Consider the dualities that he brings out in his "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy.  The speech finds Hamlet struggling with the condition of being in the world.  While it might be read as a exploration of the need to commit suicide or live through pain, one can also find the root of Hamlet's paralysis: "Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer/ The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune/ Or to take arms against a sea of troubles/ And by opposing end them?"  The crux of Hamlet's dilemma is evident here for he really does not know what path to take.  Interestingly enough, Hamlet is one of Shakespeare's most intelligent creations.  Hamlet is smart enough to understand that the crux of his dilemma is that no matter what action he takes, there is no chance of him being happy. Consciousness is thus defined as a constant and perpetual state of insecurity and doubt.  Being so intelligent, Hamlet articulates what everyone else in both drama and audience feels.  The "calamity of so long life" and "the grunt and sweat of weary life" fails to provide any release.  Hamlet recognizes this condition of being as a cursed one:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of disprized love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns 
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?

For Hamlet, such a condition of being is pain- ridden no matter what path one takes.  This becomes part of the reason that Hamlet finds it so difficult to act.  Hamlet has come to the painful realization that there is no external force that can provide guidance and a guarantee that all will be well.  There can be no condition that permits "sleep" in the most blissful of connotations.  Hamlet's pain lies in that there is no release from pain caused by insecurity and doubt.  This becomes the crux of his dilemma.

It is for this reason that Hamlet is stuck between paralysis and action.  Even when he strives to reinvision himself as "Hamlet the Dane," it is clear that Hamlet is trapped between paralysis and action because he recognizes the lack of external validation and release from pain and doubt.  Hamlet's intelligence enables him to understand that "Time is out of joint" and that he is ill prepared to "set it right." Hamlet recognizes that consciousness in the modern world, like Denmark itself, is a "prison."  It is one in which the individual is trapped.  This condition of being trapped is one where individuals are "pigeon-livered and lack gall."  Like Hamlet, individuals can articulate their condition of forlorn while being able to do little to avert it.  These conditions that Hamlet articulates throughout the drama form the crux of his dilemma, and help to explain why he is poised in difficulty.

The long-term permanent dilemma for Hamlet is to determine the "right action" for him in the face of the Ghost's appearance, an appearance that could be a false temptation of "the devil," his own subconscious wishes and fears, etc., or a legitimate message from his dead father to avenge his murder; Hamlet must "act" in the real world, without anything but his own strength of character to guide him.  If the alleged murderer had been just anyone -- a stranger or a political enemy -- it would have been difficult enough, but when the "suspects" are his uncle and his own mother, the decision is a real dilemma. Two subtle effects of the detail of Yorick's death and the convoluted romance with Ophelia are their emphasis on Hamlet's aloneness.  In the early soliloquy, in which Hamlet debates with himself "whether 'tis nobler in the mind/To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" his main dilemma is foreshadowed. The play's lasting quality is that his dilemma is our own: whether the real world is "all there is" or whether we should believe, and act on, the possibility of another reality.