Number Two And Three In Shakespeare's 'Macbeth'

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Journal 5
“Please investigate the use of the numbers two and three in Macbeth. Determine the overall associations Shakespeare wants the reader/viewer to make with both numbers.”

The numbers two and three are carefully placed all throughout Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth. They might be difficult to notice initially, but once a reader finds the trend, they will discover that the numbers are more than just a theme, they are symbols; the number two represents the duality of Macbeth’s personality and the number three represents motivation for Macbeth’s inner evil. The first occurrence of duplicity is in the first scene, when the witches say “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” (1.1.13). This quote has been used for centuries to mean that external beauty …show more content…
Like many teenagers, he has trouble embracing parts of adulthood and leaving childhood behind. But unlike many teenagers, the solution to Holden’s problem is not to “grow up” or “play by the game,” but instead it is to leave society because Holden’s main problem is not with himself, but with the world around him.
In the very beginning of the book, Holden is standing up on a hill, looking down on a school football game. He is introduced to the novel as someone who is distant from the lives of other teenagers, literally and figuratively. When he goes to visit Mr. Spencer, he is told that life is a game. Immediately rejecting the idea of playing that game, much like rejecting participation in the football game, he attempts to move the conversation along. The reader is then first introduced to the idea of phoniness, a quality that Holden points out in almost everyone he interacts with. Through Holden Caulfield’s eyes, anyone can be a phony, whether the reasoning be because they use a word too much, the way they smile, the fact that they tell students to pray, etc. Holden believes that being phony is being insincere, but really, for him, a phony is someone who embraces, or at least interacts with, the world around them. He constantly uses words to generalize groups of people and distance himself from them. For example, when he leaves Pencey, he screams, “Sleep tight, ya morons!” (Salinger 59). Running away from Pencey is a way for Holden to try to escape the morons and the phoniness around him, but he finds it all still exists when he gets to New York
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