The Tragic Hero - HOLY SPIRIT HIGH ENGLISH DEPARTMENT



Greek Tragedy and the Tragic Hero:

Definition: A tragic hero is a literary character who makes errors in judgment, in his or her own actions, that inevitably leads to his or her own downfall.

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• Greek tragedies deal mainly with the relationship of man and the gods and try to illustrate some particular lesson of life.

• The Greek tragic hero represents man and each man inevitably has some flaw. In

Greek culture the most serious flaw was hubris or excessive pride.

• The Greeks believed that every person’s life was ruled by a pre-determined fate set in motion by the gods, a force that could not be changed. Each person is fated to endure some suffering. A person who accepted his fate would endure his suffering with dignity.

• The Greeks also believed in free will. If a man exercises his freedom in defying the gods, more suffering would be heaped upon him. The protagonist or hero comes to be destroyed, but the tragedy also affects both the bad and the good; the guilty and the innocent.

• Man gains insight through his suffering and is redeemed. Sophocles’ plays are compassionate in his sympathy for his characters, no matter how deluded or broken they are.

Some Common Traits of a Tragic Hero…

✓ The hero is led to his downfall due to hubris, or excessive pride. In Greek Tragedies, the hero is NOT responsible for possessing this flaw.

✓ The hero must be doomed from the start, but bears no responsibility for bearing this flaw.

✓ The hero must have discovered his fate by his own actions, not by things happening to him.

✓ The hero must see and understand his doom, and that his fate was revealed by his own actions.

✓ The hero’s story should arouse pity and empathy.

✓ The hero must be physically or spiritually wounded by his experiences, often resulting in his death.

✓ The hero is usually a king, or leader of men, so that his people experience his fall with him.

✓ The hero should learn from his mistakes.

✓ The hero must be faced with a very serious decision.

✓ The suffering of the hero must have meaning.

✓ The hero of classical tragedies is almost universally male.

✓ A tragic hero’s story generally follows the sequence of “Great, Good, Flaw, Downfall”

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