The Birth of Tragedy

Oedipus Rex, a tragedy written by Sophocles, features Oedipus as a tragic hero with an unavoidable fate. This tragedy explores Oedipus’ quest for his true identity. His search for Laius’ murderer leads him on a search for the truth regarding his birth. Eventually, Oedipus discovers he has committed murder and incest, resulting in his exile from Thebes and his ultimate downfall. According to Aristotle’s view on tragedies and tragic heroes, a tragic hero must possess a tragic flaw that leads to…

Yesterday I visited Grand Central Station- or I should say terminal, the famous station as changed its names many times throughout the last hundred years. Grand Central’s birth was from a tragedy and underwent many changes from presidents, to abandoned tracks to restaurants, to rebuilding this station is an American Icon. The chief engineer was William J Wilgus and build two version of the terminal before the third and final station designed by Reed and Stem and Warren and Wetmore had been…

Apollonian and Dionysian are mentioned as opposites in the novel, The Birth of Tragedy/ The Case of Wagner by Friedrich Nietzsche. Such that a Dionysian artist is best defined as one in primal unity with pain and contradiction, and an Apollonian one is reflected as a symbolic dream image. In addition, to be more specific on the topic, Apollonian is based on reason and logic and Dionysian is based on chaos. However, according to Nietzsche Dionysian is important because it emphasizes the harmony…

early 1960’s the drug was found to be associated with birth defects, damaging the development of unborn babies, as it was not understood that these drug molecules could cross the placental wall, severely affecting the foetus. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the drug thalidomide affected over 10,000 babies and thousands of fetal deaths worldwide. The affected babies typically suffered from phocomelia, a failure of the limbs to develop.…

turmoil erupts in Thebes when Oedipus realizes he is the murderer of his father, Laius. However, Oedipus finds that this is not his only worry; he has just recently learned that he has married his birth mother, Jocasta. While one may say that it is Oedipus’ oblivion that makes him responsible for these tragedies, it is arguable that other characters such as the shepherd and the people of Thebes may be responsible for these events. On the other hand, in Antigone, there is a large controversial…

Aristotle, a Greek philosopher has defined tragedy as “through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation”. Using a play by Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy that can express the defined oikeia hedone, meaning the “proper pleasure” in Greek by Aristotle’s Poetics, which achieves the proper purgation or in other words, catharsis as its final cause. Tragedy can be defined as an event of great suffering, however Aristotle also mentioned that “a real tragedy was all encompassing, larger…

The Common Man’s Tragic Hero In Arthur Miller’s “Tragedy and the Common Man” the author outlines his argument that the common man can have a prominent place in modern literary tragedies, just as those of noble birth did in the classic tragedies of the past. In Larry Watson’s Montana 1948, the main character, Wes, demonstrates Miller’s definition of a common tragic hero through his struggle to do the right thing after his brother murders a young Native American woman in the town where Wes is the…

contradiction. The effect that this has on plot is that Juliet and Romeo are too meet in private for their love to prosper and their loved ends in tragedy because of the feud between the rival families. But fortunately the feud ends with the families commemorating their love and death together. The next line that is worth noticing is “Prodigious birth of love it is to me, that I must love a loathèd enemy” (1.5.152-155). This line describes love as a monster that makes Juliet fall in love with…

Shakespeare’s Tragedy Macbeth creates a story that expands on the ideas of Aristotle’s belief of a tragic hero. As Aristotle states, a tragic hero is someone who doesn’t truly become a hero without having flaws that often result in their death or their painful awakening to their character’s mistakes. Shakespeare’s Macbeth introduces Macbeth as the main character as well as the tragic hero during the playwrights acts. Throughout the play, the main character Macbeth undergoes multiple phases of…

In Oedipus The King, by Sophocles, a dramatic tragedy stars Oedipus guilty of hubris and his mother/lover, Jocasta, in a windstorm of the truth beginning to unleash. Many prophecies have been told that the characters played tricks on their fate. However their fate soon becomes a reality. Oedipus’ worst fear of murder and an affectionate relationship with his mother came to be. Aristotle’s theory explained what a tragedy really is and how this play follows his theory. As the audience begins to…