Narrative Perspective Discussed in Hamilton

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    I will be applying the Narrative Perspective discussed in Sellnow’s “What is Pop Culture and Why Study It?” to the Broadway musical Hamilton. This show is a biographical adaptation of the life of America’s first secretary of treasury, Alexander Hamilton. It includes many historical landmarks such as the Revolutionary War, the Reynolds Pamphlet, the Election of 1800, and, of course, the duel between Aaron Burr and Hamilton that led to the latter's death.

The show uses two primary lyrical motifs to display the show’s underlying theme: Burr’s statement “Wait for It” and Hamilton’s statement “My Shot”. The songs explaining these statements are linked below.

Wait For It

My Shot

Through the narrative perspective, we look into Hamilton and Burr that they are polar opposites. “Wait for It” represents Burr’s willingness to wait for the right choice before moving forward while “My Shot” represents Hamilton’s acting first, thinking later, in order to build a legacy. As the show progresses, these motifs evolve as well, revealing how the characters change too. At one point, Burr is ridiculed for his philosophy to wait while Hamilton takes a shot when writing the Reynold’s Pamphlet when thinking his legacy may be on the line. Both flip in opposite ways. Suddenly, Burr is out of control, making decisions before thinking, and Hamilton has calmed down, thinking about the life he’s built himself.

This leads to the duel. Hamilton’s statement promoting Thomas Jefferson in the Election of 1800 has cost Burr a chance to become president. This anger led Burr to blame Hamilton for any and all of his faults throughout life. This comes down to the moment we all have been waiting for: Burr and Hamilton’s duel.

Both have changed immensely since revealing their philosophies in the beginning, almost abandoning them entirely. Anyone in the audience who has learned of this event in history knows what will happen, but at the beginning, when the audience met Burr as someone hesitant and Hamilton as someone rash, no one could have guessed what would have happened when Hamilton died. The song displaying the duel is linked below.

The World was Wide Enough (Duel)

After Hamilton throws away his shot and Burr regrets killing him, a narrative perspective reveals that ambition appears somewhat on a spectrum. What I mean is that acting without hesitation is on one side while not acting with only hesitation is on the other. Never did Hamilton or Burr fall in the middle of this spectrum; they only took extreme jumps when they went to the other side. The narrative perspective shows that the moral of the story not only reveals that sitting on the extreme sides of ambition has consequences, but casting aside who one is entirely can have dire consequences as well. Burr never found success because of his constant waiting, then found himself shooting Hamilton because he threw away everything he believed. Hamilton lost respect because he constantly took his shot, then died when he chose to throw it away.