Essay on Common Tragic Flaw of Greek Tragic Protagonists: Greek Term Meaning ‘Arrogance’

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The most important and unique subgenre of dramatic literature is a tragedy. The term tragedy is greatly utilized for literary, and mainly for the dramatist, illustration of serious movements which eventuate in a disastrous conclusion for the protagonist.

A tragedy is it genre of a drama focusing on tales of human suffering. The drama normally consists of a human flaw or weak factor in one of the work’s central characters, which then triggers a devastating match or sequence of activities for these in the character’s orbit. The elements of tragedy are plot, persona, spectacle, thought, diction, and harmony, i.e., the profitable fusion of its parts.

According to Aristotle A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable accessories, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions. (The Poetics, Oxford, 1909, translated by Ingram Bywater, Chapter VI)

Aristotle based totally his idea by means of reference on the only examples available to him, the tragedies of Greek dramatists such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. In the subsequent two thousand years and more, a number of new kinds of serious plots ending in a disaster have been developed-types that Aristotle had no way of foreseeing. According to Aristotle, It has magnitude and is written in accelerated language that entertains, on the other hand, it is now not supposed to be read, for it has to be enacted upon the stage. It is a verse drama that has as its protagonist (generally not always male) the tragic hero or heroine who has stature but does no longer excel in advantage or justice; nor is he or she introduced low via such persona flaws as vice or depravity, then again by using some error of judgment or circumstance, at which point a sudden reversal, a peripety occurs. The heroic protagonist struggles to hold away from inevitable defeat ( his fate), and all through the struggle, sympathy, and terror are held in equilibrium as he (or at times she) courageously faces the human predicament. Tragedy reveals the paradox of the Aristocracy of persona mixed with human fallibility, in particular hubris excessive pleasure, or self-confidence, a tragic flaw.

The antagonist is destiny. This destiny is frequently certain up with past movements on the side of the protagonist, as in Sophocles Oedipus Rex, in which case the battle of the play becomes an internal struggle, so the overt battle is interior: Oedipus is locked in mortal combat with himself, with his past, and with the past actions of his ancestors, which he has inherited. Although the protagonist is heroic, and as such is in a way godlike, he or she is in addition human, and human beings are fallible. The tragic flaw is commonly now no longer physical, however; it can in addition, in addition, be pride, a lapse in judgment, arrogance, or some more moral flaw, and the protagonist can in addition no longer even be aware it exists.

Since the heroic protagonist of a tragedy is in actuality good, but in addition the bearer of evil, he or she ought to be punished; it is this paradox that affords tragedy its dramatic anxiousness. The whole audience will see the fall from the grace of a tremendous figure, and the fall will be mighty. It will be an anguished fall; the intention is to make the audience sense the irony of the situation and the passion of such an ethical spectacle. The hero or heroine acknowledges the fact of impending doom, in many instances in the form of a persona who bears the message of the protagonist`s fate. Perhaps the protagonist will attempt to rectify what is barring a doubt coming, on the outstanding hand that strives produces the opposite effect, hastening doom instead; this is referred to as peripeteia. Once the climax of the drama has occurred that is, the final rising action in a sequence of rising actions and the fall has taken place, the universe will have again been set right, and the essential rightness of the protagonist’s destruction should be sensed by the audience. Despite the feeling that a mortal injustice has taken place, an extended or poetic justice has been served, and this comic justice leads to a purging of the ideas of worry and pity that have been considered in the play by the actions of the drama and the character of the protagonist. In the denouement of the play, the free ends of the plot will be drawn together and the tragedy bought to a close.

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