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| Poetry Glossary: Tragic Hero |
See hamartia
| Wikipedia: Tragic hero |
A tragic hero is the main character in a tragedy. The modern use of the term usually involves the notion that such a hero make an error in their actions that leads to his or her downfall.[1] The idea that this be a balance of crime and punishment is incorrectly ascribed to Aristotle, who is quite clear in his pronouncement that the hero's misfortune is not brought about "by vice and depravity but by some error of judgment." In fact, in Aristotle's Poetics it is imperative that the tragic hero be noble. Later tragedians swerved from this tradition, with the result that the more prone the tragic hero was to vice, the less noble--and the less tragic in the Aristotelian sense of the word.[2]
Tragic heroes appear in the dramatic works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Marston, Corneille, Racine, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Strindberg, and many other writers.
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Some common traits characteristic of a tragic protagonist:
In the modernist era a new kind of tragic hero was synthesized as a reaction to the English Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, and Romanticism. The modern hero, rather than falling calamitously from a high position, begins the story appearing to be an ordinary, average person; for example, Truman Capote's Perry Smith from "In Cold Blood". Also, Arthur Miller's Joe Keller in All My Sons (1947) is an average man, which serves to illustrate Miller's belief that all people, not just the nobility, are affected by materialistic and capitalist values. The modern hero's story does not require the protagonist to have the traditional catharsis to bring the story to a close. He may die without an epiphany of his destiny and he may suffer without the ability to change events that are happening to him. The story may end without closure and even without the death of the hero. This new hero of modernism is the antihero and may not be considered by all to even be a tragic hero. Tony Montana from Scarface and Carlito in Carlito's Way also are.
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