Macbeth’s struggle for happiness and purpose is a relatively simple one. He believes that if he can attain status, specifically become king, he will have lived a meaningful and purposeful life. He goes against his nature and resorts to murder to achieve his goal. One can tell that his violent behavior is against his nature by the way he’s affected afterwards. He becomes restless and starts to see things. It is unclear whether these things are real or just imaginings brought on by his guilty conscious but either way they affect him more than anything else. Macbeth does not fear any mortal enemy, not even MacDuff though he is warned about him, only the unnatural. He was very confident and did not think he would fail.
Smith felt that he needed to change the way the government controlled his country in order to be happy and for his life to have had a purpose. Unlike Macbeth, what he does is not against his nature. He feels no guilt for planning to go against Big Brother and is willing to do anything. Another big difference between Smith and Macbeth is that Smith does not believe he will succeed. He has accepted the fact that the government will realize he is going against them and that he will be caught, tortured and then killed.
Smith’s goal was for the benefit of society, it was not just for his own personal gain. Macbeth’s goal was purely for his and his wife’s benefit. He was not concerned with making his country a better place, merely wanted wealth and power. In the end both failed, one because he was overconfident and the other because the force he was opposing was far too strong. They were both betrayed by someone they thought they could trust. Smith thought he could trust INSERTNAMEHERE when in fact INSERTNAMEHERE was working for Big Brother. He was also betrayed by his lover, Julia and in the end he betrayed her as well. Macbeth made the mistake of taking the witches’ prophecies at face value and being tricked by the way they spoke. He believed that he would not be able to be killed by any mortal man because of what the “Laugh to scorn the power of man, for none of woman born hall harm Macbeth” (77, Macbeth). He later learned, much to his dismay that technically Macduff was not born of a woman since he was delivered by caesarian section.
Macbeth fit into his society and was well liked. He held a highly regarded position and was on good terms with the king. Despite his already honorable position and rather comfortable life he still felt the need to gain more power. Smith was an average person, he wasn’t well liked but wasn’t disliked by the people he worked and lived with. He held a job at the Records Department and was quite unhappy with it. Smith did not agree with many things the government did and was constantly worrying that he would be imprisoned for thoughtcrime. The government in his society was very controlling and was constantly watching and listening to its citizens. If someone made a certain facial expression or reacted a little bit differently there was a good chance that they’d disappear. He felt the only way to be happy was to act out against the government, if he didn’t he thought he would eventually crack and they’d realize his true feelings. The first thing he did that was an open act against Big Brother was writing in a journal. When he met Julia he started to sneak off with her and engaged in sexual activities, which was strictly against the government. Big Brother taught that sexual intercourse was only a way to reproduce and should not be enjoyable. With Julia he decided to do more against the government, which led to him being captured after meeting with someone he considered to be a friend. Smith had started off small and never really got a chance to do anything big, Macbeth’s first act in his plan was the most drastic one. It was killing the king. After the first murder the rest of the crimes he committed was just to hide the fact that Macbeth did murder King Duncan.
Macbeth stayed true to his goal up to his death. Even when he realized that the witches’ had misled him and that he was going to die he still fought back. The government in 1984 managed to break Smith with a combination of physical and mental torture. He resisted at first, choosing to cling to what he knew to be true. O’Brien tried to convince Smith that two plus two did not make four. Eventually the intense pain from being shocked made Smith believe him. However he was not completely changed until the government threatened to put the cage with the hungry rats on his face, then he betrayed Julia and was completely broken. This shows that if someone has enough understanding of human nature and feels no remorse at subjecting someone to torture then they can change the way someone thinks and how they see things. The witches in Macbeth knew exactly what to say and what to do in order to influence Macbeth to murder King Duncan. In both pieces of writing the people that Smith/Macbeth think are helping them are really leading them to their doom. Neither character realizes that they are being lead and manipulated until its too late and they can do nothing to save themselves.