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ABSTRACT
The efficacy of the deictic shift theory has been explored in uncovering many aspects of both literary and non-literary works. For some, it reveals implicit themes, poetic persona, and for others, it explains how rhetoric strategies are employed to achieve certain aims. It is a theory that accounts for the imaginative construction of the world of narratives. The reader moves around the story world from the position of the author or fictional characters as a deictic centre in his own space and time. In the current study, the theory is employed to study the character of Hamlet in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet whohas been the subject of many complex-character debates and is taken to be the quintessential complex character. As such, we undertake this study to objectively define his personality through deixis. The six categories of deixis which are perceptual, spatial, temporal, relational, compositional and textual are tracked in their linguistic representatives and through a cognitive processing of these words to describe the character of Hamlet.
