Examples Of Aristotle And The Tragic Hero

Register to read the introduction… Aristotle distinguished common characteristics found in the tragic hero. He believed moral choice determined character, not birth. Tragic characters are those who take life seriously and seek worthwhile goals, while comic characters are "good-for-nothings" who waste their lives in trivial pursuits (Else 77). The tragic protagonist is always a person of whose decisions determine their own fate as well as those of others. He must hold an important position, must be doomed from the start, but bears no responsibility for possessing his flaw, must be imperfect so that the audience can see themselves in him, must have discovered his fate by his own actions, not by things happening to him. He must understand his downfall and his story should arouse fear and empathy through his physical or spiritual wounds. Most importantly, he must possess hamartia or a “tragic flaw”. Whether Aristotle regards the “flaw” as intellectual or moral has been hotly discussed. It may cover both senses. The hero must not deserve his misfortune, but he must cause it by making a fatal mistake, an error of judgement, which may well involve some imperfection of character but not such as to make us regard him as “morally responsible” for the disasters although they are nevertheless the consequences of the flaw in him, and his wrong decision at a crisis is the inevitable outcome of his character (Poetics, …show more content…
The audience may have felt depressed or they might have felt uplifted or enlightened with tragic pleasure. Based on their emotion, one could conclude whether or not they saw justification in the heroes’ actions or whether they viewed the work as a criticism. In Poetics, these emotions are communicated through the aspects of tragedy which include: the crisis, the catharthis, and the reversal (anagnorisis). For example in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Oedipus is at first relieved to find out that the prophesy of murdering his father was wrong but then his uncertainty of the truth is renewed when it is revealed that Polybos was not his real father. Oedipus’s confidence and arrogance continued to the very end of Oedipus the King. Oedipus experiences a reversal when he gets the message that his father has died of old age. He questioned Creon, interrogated Tiresias, threatened him and Creon, found the servant who escaped the attack on Laius, and after realizing he murdered his father and married his mother, he was overcome by