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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A tragic hero is the main character in a tragedy who makes an error in his or her actions that leads to his or her downfall.^[1] 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.

Contents 1 Common traits 2 Famous tragic heroes 3 Modern tragic heroes 4 References

[edit] Common traits

Some common traits characteristic of a tragic protagonist:

• The hero discovers his fate by his own actions, not by things happening to him.
• The hero sees and understands his doom, and that his fate was revealed by his own actions.
• The hero's downfall is understood by Aristotle to arouse pity and fear.
• The hero is physically or spiritually wounded by his experiences, often resulting in his death.
• A tragic hero is often of noble birth, or rises to noble standing (King Arthur, Okonkwo, the main character in Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart.)
• The hero learns something from his/her mistake.
• The hero is faced with a serious decision.
• The suffering of the hero is meaningful.
• There may sometimes be supernatural involvement (in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Caesar is warned of his death via Calpurnia's vision and Brutus is warned of his impending death by the ghost of Caesar).
• The Shakespearean tragic hero dies at some point in the story, for example Macbeth. Shakespeare's characters illustrate that tragic heroes are neither fully good nor fully evil. Through the development of the plot a hero's mistakes, rather than his quintessential goodness or evil, lead to his tragic downfall.
• The hero of classical tragedies is almost universally male. Later tragedies (like Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra) introduced the female tragic hero. Portrayals of female tragic heroes are notable because they are rare.^[2]

[edit] Famous tragic heroes

• Macbeth
• Othello
• King Lear
• Oedipus
• Hamlet
• Richard III
• Caesar
• Brutus
• Doctor Faustus
• Antigone
• Romeo Montague
• Juliet Capulet
• Heracles
• Achilles

[edit] Modern tragic heroes

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, 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.

[edit] References