The reason Shakespeare's Hamlet feels so strange is because its titular character, Hamlet, is all train. Shakespeare’s tragedy is woven around inevitability. It is linear, deterministic up until the train crashes, but even that tragedy is still expected. Hamlet is locked in a series of motions, like a train on rails. Burdened by the ghost of his father, he is forced into the role of revenge, trapped by his sense of moral duty and the conflict of his id and superego. Once the tracks of this conflict are laid, the train can do little more than follow the path made. Hamlet cannot and in turn does not want to escape the path he has set out, and he is driven insane by the forces of his mind that disagree.
The play's plot unfolds with a tragic precision. Every moment is an inevitability, with the weight of responsibility pressing down upon Hamlet as he moves ever forward. Hamlet, in his soliloquies, speaks of what weighs him down and the inescapability of death. Each thought is just a reaction to the previous, he does not think a single non sequitur. Hamlet, in a state of great jealousy, is finally self cognizant enough to remark “How all occasions do inform against me / And spur my dull revenge" (Shakespeare 4.4.32-33). Like a train nearing the end of its tracks, he knows the end is coming. This moment of clarity, unfortunately, only sets to deepening his sense of being locked down in an environment that does not support him.
Kaladin Stormblessed, the main character from The Stormlight Archive, suffers from a distinctly different problem. He chooses and chooses and keeps choosing wrong. A Crab avoids all choices simply because he has so many. He is so much a crab that his world is filled with crabs, as if each is a projection of his own mind. Unlike Hamlet, who is shackled by his sense of moral duty and the deterministic forces around him, Kaladin is constantly confronted with the flexibility of choice and the unpredictable nature of the world. A labyrinth of potential decisions, each one carrying with it a weight of consequences and opportunities for change. Like any human, Kaladin makes mistakes, but unlike every human, he lets them ruin him. His mental state described his mental state as: “He felt good lots of days. Trouble was, on the bad days, that was hard to remember. [...] he felt like he had always been in darkness, and always would be.” (Sanderson, 69) Kaladin fails to separate himself from his past actions, and he cannot evolve further, he is stuck, optimized to death, as a crab.
Sigmund Freud was a psychologist before psychology was invented, and his theory of the 3 physics zones explain what it means to be a train and a crab. In the case of Hamlet, the id, driven by primal desires, is not sufficiently constrained by the superego, which imposes a moral and social obligation which the ego enacts. The id overpowering the other physic zones, causes Hamlet to be unable to think rationally, and goes down the track of pure emotional decision making. In contrast, Kaladin's id pushes him toward strong emotional reactions, but his superego drives him stronger to keep making decisions that end up severely affecting him in the future. Instead of sticking to a single path his ego enters a state of decision paralysis, with too many options causing more harm then none.
We can extend this analysis by considering how the societal norms and expectations that shape an individual’s supergo are affected by their gender and behavior, pushing them into specific roles and limiting their agency. In Hamlet, the train’s inevitability can be viewed as a metaphor for the rigid gender expectations of Elizabethan society. Hamlet is burdened not only by personal and moral obligations but by the pressure to fulfill the role of a son avenging his father’s death. A task traditionally tied to masculine ideals of honor, revenge, and duty. His inability to break free from this preordained path reflects the confines of the male identity. The already skewed tension between his id and superego becomes more strained as his ego struggles to find a way to express these desires within the narrow confines of masculinity imposed upon him by societal norms.
Kaladin, on the other hand, represents a different struggle in The Stormlight Archive. His psychological paralysis—his superego making him make too many decisions—can be understood through the pressure to embody an idealized form of masculinity. Kaladin is expected to be strong, capable, and a leader, all of which tie him to a traditional, heroic masculine archetype. However, his self-doubt, emotional vulnerability, and his inability to reconcile these aspects of himself with his idealized role reflect the internal conflict between his genuine self and the masculine expectations forced upon him. The indecision he faces is a symptom of trying to navigate all these choices. Unfortunately, this forms a negative feedback loop, where each decision he enacts makes him feel worse, and pushes him further and further into depression.
According to the phrase from the beginning, any train or crab should be optimized to perfection. Unfortunately, being human is more than being perfect, and it's all about choice. Allow too many choices to affect your wellbeing, and you feel as if you have no control. Allow too little, and you will feel the same way. From reading into Hamlet and The Stormlight Archive, it becomes obvious that the phrase itself can be optimized further. Optimize almost anything enough, and you end up with a crab or a train, optimize yourself enough, you should end up with an eel. Slippery enough to fall off the tracks, but straight enough to use them. Smart enough to be empowered by societal norms, but wise enough to be unique when necessary. An eel takes the best features of both the crab and the train, with the id and the superego collaborating even in times of great strife.