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Faults Written in the Stars
During the Ancient Grecian time periods, tragedy meant death because one defied against an outer prophecy. Modern day tragedy was simply realism, the unspoken way of life. In Sophocles' Oedipus the King and Ibsen's A Doll's House, the main characters - Nora and Oedipus, are both constructed to illustrate flaws in society and how naive people are. Ibsen and Sophocles both developed tragedy into a central idea that all people surreptitiously understand. Nora and Oedipus make incompetent decisions that assist in discovering their fundamental nature as tragic heroes and provoke sorrow and pity among the audience.
Oedipus lived his entire life in a dark shadow of ignorance, just like Nora. Oedipus' archetype of a tragic hero begins as an all-powerful, honorable king that believed he could solve any riddle, and acts rapidly on decisions. Oedipus lacked complete self knowledge, “I will speak out now as a stranger to the story, a stranger to the crime. If I’d been present then, there would have been no mystery, no long hunt without clue in hand” (Oe...
In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Ibsen's A Doll's House, the main characters - Nora and Oedipus, are both constructed to illustrate flaws in society. Oedipus' psychological evolution sees him begin as an all-powerful, righteous king, who seemingly through no fault of his own murders his father and marries his mother. His evolution ends with his self-blinding, an action which Sophocles' uses to establish the true freedom of the individual before divine authority. In A Doll's House, the development of Nora Helmer leads her from believing that she is happily married to realizing that she is a mere possession for her husband's entertainment. By her decision at the end of the play to leave her family and explore her own self-identity, Ibsen is insinuating that concern for oneself is far from selfish; it is in fact a supreme duty. Both plays introduced new waves of thought into society, and proved that freedom and justice are essentially matters of individual decision and responsibility.1
Tragedy is a broad genre that may take many forms. Sophocles' Oedipus the King and Shakespeare's Hamlet both contain the basic elements of tragedy, but Hamlet is a tragic hero, while Oedipus is a tragic villain. From the opening moments of Hamlet, the audience knows that Hamlet must avenge his father's death. Oedipus, on the other hand, kills his own father and unwittingly marries his mother, thus sealing his own fate and fulfilling the prophecy that stated he would do just that.
“Oedipus Rex”, by Sophocles is a play which perfectly follows the template of tragedy where Oedipus is in search of his own identity. “A Doll’s House”, By Henrik Ibsen is not necessarily a tragic play although it does contain a tragic hero. Nora Helmer and Oedipus are both considered tragic heroes in their own different ways but they come to realize the importance of self-knowledge. To compare and contrast Nora and Oedipus, the analysis can be broken down into 3 stages; both characters statuses at the beginning of the play, their own experience of their downfall and the similarities for the knowledge that they have gained.
Classical tragedy is one of the most popular sorts of tragedy. The main ideas of classical tragedies include pity and fear for the victim; downfall from a high position for the main character. They usually end in the death of the protagonist, they start in harmony and end in chaos, and it is usually the innocent character that suffers. Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus Rex’ is probably the most famous classical tragedy ever written. Sophocles first produced the play in Athens around 430 B.C. at the Great Dionysian, a religious and cultural festival held in honour of the god Dionysus. The story of ‘Oedipus Rex’ is about a boy who is fated to kill his father, and marry his mother. One of the main features of classical tragedies is that whatever is ‘fated’ to happen, during the story, will always happen, and the characters cannot change it, it is an inevitable tragedy.
The great Sophoclean play, Oedipus Rex is an amazing play, and one of the first of its time to accurately portray the common tragic hero. Written in the time of ancient Greece, Sophocles perfected the use of character flaws in Greek drama with Oedipus Rex. Using Oedipus as his tragic hero, Sophocles’ plays forced the audience to experience a catharsis of emotions. Sophocles showed the play-watchers Oedipus’s life in the beginning as a “privileged, exalted [person] who [earned his] high repute and status by…intelligence.” Then, the great playwright reached in and violently pulled out the audience’s most sorrowful emotions, pity and fear, in showing Oedipus’s “crushing fall” from greatness.
From the times of Aristotle to modern day Boal people have tried to come up with a definition of tragedy that encompasses all of the works they feel to be tragedies. However, there are always a few exceptions to their rules that make their thesis insubstantial. Those who define tragedies all have different elements that they say are necessary in classifying something as a tragedy. Unfortunately for us, no one definition has ever been settled upon that everyone agrees with. The one factor that does seem to be present in every interpretation of what is necessary in a tragedy is the catharsis that is brought up in the viewer. Without that emotional reaction, whether of pity, empathy, sympathy, or perturbation, a work never seems to be classified as a tragedy. O'Neill wrote Desire Under the Elms borrowing themes from the myths of Phaedra, Medea, and Oedipus. He was trying to create a Greek tragedy in the setting of his time. Racine wrote Phedre in classic Greek style, attempting to create a Greek tragedy that had been written in the modern day. Both of these plays sought to entwine the modern world with Greek tragedies. While they each have distinctly different ways of accomplishing their goal of writing a modern Greek tragedy, they are both tragedies in their own way and bring about the similar effect of Catharsis.
In the reading “Poetics” by Greek philosopher Aristotle, the word Tragedy is defined as “an imitation of an action that is serious complete and of certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament” (Aristotle 1). This indicates that tragedy is foreshadowing what might happen in the future. In the book of Oedipus Rex, written by Sophocles, a Greek Philosopher as well, tragedy is well defined throughout the book. The components of tragedy are the following: good or fine, fitness of character, true to life or realistic, true to themselves, necessary or probable, yet more beautiful. A modern tragedy has the components in which characters no longer must be a king or anyone important with power, but it can be anybody
Greek tragedy is characterized by the emotional catharsis brought about by the horrific suffering of a heroic figure. In Oedipus The King, by Sophocles, the onslaught of pain assailing the protagonist is a result of his tragic flaw. Sophocles often used a characters hamartia to alter or influence the outcome or future of the hero. Oedipus' hubris traps him to fulfil the oracle and intensifies his punishment.
Tragedy has been apart of human history since the dawning of civilization. Man has been plunged into terrible tragedies for ages. But not until the Greeks and prominent playwrights such as Sophocles did tragedy take on into its own on the stage. Out of this rebirth of tragedy came what has been considered, even by Aristotle himself, the greatest tragedy ever written, Oedipus the King. He delves into the human psyche: bringing forth the notion of predestination, a supposition desperately believed in by humans, betraying the fatal flaws of his hero and manifesting the suffering brought upon the hero by his tragic downfall. Though it was written more than a millennium ago, its basis and structure for tragedy has held strong, showing true in the modern tragedy of A Doll’s House. Written by Henrik Ibsen, it is a more down to earth tragedy on a level and situation that almost anyone can relate to. Though the heroine of the tragedy is almost no different than Oedipus, she has a form of personal nobility and pride that leads her to actions that eventually bring about her downfall. She suffers, she feels emotion. Both Oedipus the King and A Doll’s House set forth a range of human emotions that allows the audience to connect and feel for the tragedy, given to one to reflect upon human nature.
Sophocles’ Oedipus is the tragedy of tragedies. An honorable king is deceived and manipulated by the gods to the point of his ruination. In the face of ugly consequences Oedipus pursues the truth for the good of his city, finally exiling himself to restore order. Sophocles establishes emotional attachment between the king and the audience, holding them in captivated sympathy as Oedipus draws near his catastrophic discovery. Oedipus draws the audience into a world between a rock and a hard place, where sacrifice must be made for the greater good.
Numerous people have tried to define a tragedy, and even with the most popular definitions, flaws are still apparent within it. When analyzing the stories, Oedipus the King and Romeo and Juliet, using Aristotle’s well-renounced definition of a tragedy. Differences between them become clear and their similarities obscured. The story of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare is about two young lovers on opposing families and through a series of misfortunes end up killing themselves. Oedipus the King by Sophocles is about a king who did not have any control over his destiny and in the end does everything he tried not to do. The distinctions between these two stories become evident because of noble figures, acknowledgment of consequences, and catharsis.
Before the twentieth century plays were mainly written as either a tragedy or comedy. In a tragic play the tragic hero will often do something that will eventually destroy him. In the book Oedipus the King, Oedipus is the tragic hero. In this tragic play the main character, which is portrayed as Oedipus, will do a good deed that will in turn make him a hero. This hero will reach his height of pride in the story, and in the end the action, which he had committed earlier, will return and destroy this man who was once called a hero.
According to Aristotle, a tragedy must be an imitation of life in the form of a serious story that is complete in itself among many other things. Oedipus is often portrayed as the perfect example of what a tragedy should be in terms of Aristotle’s Poetics. Reason being that Oedipus seems to include correctly all of the concepts that Aristotle describes as inherent to dramatic tragedy. These elements include: the importance of plot, reversal and recognition, unity of time, the cathartic purging and evocation of pity and fear, the presence of a fatal flaw in the “hero”, and the use of law of probability.
Oedipus the King by Sophocles has the ingredients necessary for a good Aristotelian tragedy. The play has the essential parts that form the plot, consisting of the peripeteia, anagnorisis and a catastrophe; which are all necessary for a good tragedy according to the Aristotelian notion. Oedipus is the perfect tragic protagonist, for his happiness changes to misery due to hamartia (an error). Oedipus also evokes both pity and fear in its audience, causing the audience to experience catharsis or a purging of emotion, which is the true test for any tragedy according to Aristotle.
The concept of tragic hero is very important in the construction of tragedy. It is the main cause of pity and fear. The tragic hero is a character between the two extremes; he is neither virtuous nor evil. At the same time, this character is better than the ordinary men or audience, he has some good qualities. Moreover, as a tragic hero, he is moving from happiness to misery by his downfall at the end. In fact, this downfall is caused by an error or a flaw in his character not by a vice or depravity. Another feature in the tragic hero is that he has good reputation and he is a man of prosperity. It can be said that Oedipus is a tragic hero because he has all the previous mentioned characteristics and the whole play is a classical application of this concept.