It is often said that the function of novels is to pose questions, rather than answer them. I have never really understood why this should be the case. But recently, making my first (admittedly late) traversal through Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I stumbled upon a monologue that shed some light on this aphorism.
The monologue is none other than the famous melancholic outpouring of Hamlet at the start of act 3, which begins: To be or not to be, that is the question. It’s a riveting speech. Hamlet is that rare character who manages to invite the reader into the depths of his soul and embalm us with his enigmas. And nowhere is this attraction of his more apparent than in this famous paragraph.
The question is obvious enough: Should one live or die? What is not so obvious, or wasn’t so obvious to me, is just why this question needed to star in a Shakespearian play. Countless thinkers must have tackled it, perhaps to no avail, and Shakespeare is not a philosopher.
Why, then, did he write this didactic, though haunting, monologue?
The answer, I think, is that for Shakespeare, novelists, and readers alike, what is relevant is not the question itself, but the soul that asks it. A question in a work of art is a symbol, through which the contortions of the human heart are revealed. Only anguished characters would feel the need to ask questions. Answers are merely answers; they are practical solutions to objective problems. So, inasmuch as novels are concerned with the workings of the soul, questions are far more interesting than answers.
In English class I always felt like a pig sniffing around for truffles, because the teachers would force us to find the ‘lesson’ in stories. If stories are about lessons, why don’t they just tell us what it is? Why do we have to look for other people’s lessons? So this axiom appears to make sense.