n pictures adapted from it track the adult experience of Michael Corleone, from one who is hostile to the family business (organized crime), through his career as worthy successor to his father's position as effective and ruthless Mafia patriarch, and into the period of his life after he attempts to renounce his position as Mafia don. Surrounding that human drama are rich lines of action and character that portray the violence endemic to the world of organized crime and the government corruption that feeds and is fed by it. The drama is intense because the stakes are high. As Hyman Roth, sometime mentor and gangster rival of Michael puts it: "We're bigger than US Steel" (Coppola, 1974). Indeed, the stakes are so high that Michael can extricate himself from his crime family only at the cnst of his immediate family.
From a morally conventional point of view, analysis and understanding of Michael's character may seem an indulgence that grants heroic stature to one who is, after all, a murderous thug. That fact might suggest that Michael does not fit either the Aristotelian or the Shakespearean profile of tragic hero. For example, Aristotle envisions a figure who is not necessarily entirely virtuous and "whose fall into misery is not due to vice and depravity, but to some great error" (Aristotle, 1965, p. 48). In conversation with Horatio, Hamlet articulates the idea of a tragic figure who, however virtuous, may also possess "some vicious mole of nature" that carries "the stamp of one defect" and "Shall in the general censure take corruption / From that particular fault" (Ham. I.iv).
It is difficult to class Michael's murders of his "enemies" outside the scope of vice and depravity and inside the scope of innate virtue, especially since the murders he commits reinforce the benefits he receives from the vice rackets that exploit the weaknesses of others. On the other hand, a case might be made that he falls prey to a "great error" when...