Hamartia

Aristotle once said, “A man does not become a hero until he can see the root of his own downfall.” Aristotle believed that a tragic hero was one who was noble by nature yet endowed with a tragic flaw or hamartia. This hero is oftentimes morally equivalent to normal people, allowing the audience to relate to them. Over the course of their life, different virtues show up but they’re eventually matched with an imperfection and that leads them to make an irreversible mistake when faced with a…

thing to do. Neither one of them want to put their pride aside and reason with the other. Sophocles’ Antigone demonstrates that excessive pride can cause great regret. Sophocles illustrates this concept though the protagonist/antagonist description, hamartia, and anagnorisis. It is often easy to determine the protagonist and the antagonist in…

you are. While some face these fates with ignorance, some do so with honor. Taking into consideration of the many characteristics, Oedipus The King is a tragedy because it includes the protagonist’s hamartia, an anagnorisis, and peripetia. Every true tragedy comes complete with a protagonist’s hamartia, a tragic flaw resulting from a central part of their virtue. At first glance, the story seems to argue that we are all bound to an unavoidable fate, power beyond our control, but farther reading…

The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice is a book written by Shakespeare, thought to be written in the early sixteenth century. This Shakespearean tragic tale has jealousy and deceit as it’s silent killer, and it opens up in Venice, Italy where the “honest” Iago plans to deceive the honorable and brave native Egyptian Moor named Othello because he was not given the promoted up a rank. Instead the moor chose Michael Cassio. Iago begins to form hatred inside of himself claiming that he was only…

a fair person, but his ambition(fatal flaw) makes him do foul things. There are many famous tragic heroes such as Hamlet and Romeo. Macbeth has a Hamartia, he has a Hubris, he has an Anagnorisis, his Nemesis, and lastly is Catharsis. Because he has all of these traits he is a tragic hero. Hamartia is when a hero has a fatal flaw, Macbeth's Hamartia is his ambition which plays a major part in his downfall. Macbeth is starting to think about killing Duncan, but fights the urge, this is at the…

Gandhi once said, “Anger is the enemy of non violence and pride is a monster that swallows it up.” Pride and honor meant a lot to ancient Greeks but in the play Antigone by Sophocles, the reader sees that too much pride can prove to be a fatal flaw. At the start of the play, both Antigone and Creon seem to be morally justified in their quests. Antigone simply wants to bury her brother, who had died in battle, but Creon demands that nobody touch the body because he had died fighting against…

admirable traits. For some, the thought of a “tragic hero” could seem somewhat contradicting and confusing. However, the Greek philosopher Aristotle defines a tragic hero as a character who, for the most part, is a good person but suffers from his or her hamartia and hubris, which ultimately leads to their downfall and recognition of their poor choices as well as the reversal of their situation. The play Fences written by August Wilson describes the struggles and hardships of an African-American…

old story, Oedipus Rex, details the story of a gallant king who falls from grace, because of fate. The king of Thebes has done many dauntless deeds, including defeating a Sphinx. He was a prideful man, full of kingly arrogance and more. This man’s hamartia was his hubris. Oedipus is a tragic hero because the audience envisions him in that light. The king of Thebes is a chivalrous caser, through his time before and after leadership he was heroic. He conquered a Sphinx riddle and was…

Oedipus’ hamartia is hubris or excessive pride, and it causes him to believe he can overcome Apollo’s prophecy of, “defile[ing] my [Oedipus’s] mother’s bed, ...bring[ing] forth men a human family that people could not bear to look upon,” and “murdering the father…

In Ancient Greece, the epitome of the tragic theater was Sophocles’ Oedipus plays, according to Aristotle, and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet defined the Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Playwrights today still take ideas from Greek and Elizabethan theater and modernize them in their own plays, such as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and The Crucible and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Undoubtedly, the focus, themes, conflict, and structure of a tragedy has changed and evolved from…