Tragedy

How do the word tragedy and tragic effect the notion of what consists of tragic elements in the story and what makes a character tragic.

Stagg (1994) has defined a tragedy as having two basic elements: 1) a hero with enough stature to make his or her suffering significant, and 2) a course of action by the hero that produces enlightenment to his or her situation. Aristotle, who was one of the first great philosophers to be recorded discussing drama, said that a tragedy must "imitate actions arousing fear and pity" (quoted in Adler & Wolfe, 1959, p. 30).

Historically, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex has been the story that defined tragedy as its strengths have been pointed to repeatedly by many notable authors, as well as cited by Aristotle in his Poetics (Lewin, 1997). More recently, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman has been perceived as being a modern tragedy, that is the tragic tale of the loss of one man's dreams for his life and his family. On a surface level, this may seem to be similar to tale of loss told by Oedipus, who also had dreams and goals for himself and his family. Yet these two characters were very different from one another, although both tragic in their own ways. This paper will compare Oedipus and Willy Loman and explore the different ways that they are tragic figures.

Oedipus is considered one of the best examples of a tragic figure since he appears to have everything, yet loses everything. As the play opens, the audience learns that a plague has se

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laid on others fall on me (lines 236-249). The curse does fall on Oedipus as he blinds himself in self-defilement and appears to lose everything, although Sophocles has him still alive and being led back into the palace at the end instead of dead and/or banished. However, at this point Oedipus has been humbled and may have attained some wisdom about how the gods work in the lives of mortals. So, he would fulfill Stagg's second criteria, of achieving some type of enlightenment in the course of his ordeal (Stagg, 1994, p. 1). The fate of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, while not the same, can be seen to be similar to that of Oedipus', indeed, Stagg (1994) has called it an "Oedipal ritual" (p. 1). First, Willy Loman is an average man. He has no great stature other than being called "prince" occasionally by the other characters because of his dreams and goals. However, his goals are lofty for they are the great American dream and Willy Loman has become enamored of that dream. So while he, himself does not fit Stagg's first criteria of a tragedy, his ideals and dreams do. In fact, it may be that it is those very ideals that are being put on trial in this play (Stagg, 1994). Other than that, he is married and has chil

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