In Hamlet and the Snowman , personal reflections of the author are joined with literary criticism in a common endeavor - a search to arrive at vision and meaning in life and literature. In the course of that effort, literary classics by Anderson, Shakespeare, Melville, Dostoyevsky, and Becket are analyzed, and the findings are evaluated within the framework of Newman's personal reflections. The search, taken step by step, slowly leads to those fundamental elements that make up one's vision of life and its meaning as well as recognition of their universality and similarities in both life and literature.