My Opinions

My opinions did not change about Macbeth after the discussion because I believed and still believe that as an adult Macbeht should have the power ti shut off negative influences from his surroundings. However he still went ahead with the crime.

The discussion today left loose ends to many questions and because of the lack of time we did not have time to answer all of the questions too. I felt that half of the class took one opinion and the other half took the other. Therefore we had a clash during the discussion and due to our arguing we did not actually form a solution to the question. The problem causing question was “Did Macbeth willfully choose evil over good?” I took the stance that Macbeth had the chance to back out and block the influences however decided to murder King Duncan at his own prerogative. Then later on in the story, Macbeth becomes insane and calls a hit on Banquo and his son, Fleance. No one can argue that Macbeth was under the influence when he called this hit. Lady Macbeth was unaware of this act and the witches have not been mentioned for almost two straight acts.
Chatzy was great addition to our discussion because everyone was active one way or another using Chatzy. When someone was talking, the rest of the class was listening and typing their thoughts and opinions about the response. It was confusing at first, I was trying to decide whether I should talk more verbally or just continuously comment on Chatzy, however towards the end it got better and I was able to focus on both discussions. There were several problems with Chatzy however. The first and most important problem was that the verbal discussion and the Chatzy discussion had two different topics. Therefore when I was focusing on the Chatzy conversation, I had no idea about the topic of the verbal conversation. The second problem was that everyone was disagreeing with other’s thoughts almost to a point that they are arguing. In addition the negative comments came up so fast even before the speaker can even reach his/her point. In conclusion Chatzy was a bit whimsical at the beginning but as time went on it got better.
The only big question I have left is the same question I asked in class “Since Macbeth is a grown man with his own beliefs, why can he not just shut off the influences when he decided he does not want to murder King Duncan.” Everyone in class that opposed my opinion on the former question “Did Macbeth willfully choose evil over good?” said that Macbeth did not have a mind of his own, rather he was controlled by the witches. My point is how can he be controlled by the witches when the witches never interacted with Macbeth after the first act? And let’s just say he was influenced by the prophecy, his instincts, his own mind, told him that the only way to achieve this goal is to murder King Duncan. Therefore this proves that Macbeth does in fact have a mind of his own and no one is controlling his acts.