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What Is Tragedy? | Definition & Examples

Updated: 2 days ago

Tragedy is a branch of literature that deals with the sorrowful events that befall a heroic figure. It typically refers to dramatic works; however, it can be expanded to include novels and film. Tragedy as understood within the context of Western literary tradition is the heritage of classical Greek tradition. 


It was pioneered by three famous Greek playwrights from Athens: Aeschylus (who lived between 525 and 456 bce), Sophocles (who lived between 496 and 406 bce), and Euripides (who lived between 480 and 406 bce). We see tragedies today as mere entertainment. Not so in Ancient Athens. It was carried out as a public festival or ritual that provided catharsis and moral education for the whole community.


These performances were more religious than entertaining, with priests attending to altars to the gods being featured prominently. Tragedies typically focused on the misfortunes of legendary Greek heroes from myths and history. Lastly, to emphasize their communal ethos, they featured a chorus, which is a group of performers who provided commentary and context for the event of the play. In this article, we examine the Greek tragedy of Antigone. In addition, we compare it to the tragedy of Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare and Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart, which features the tragedy of the protagonist Okonkwo.
The novelist Chinua Achebe from 1966.

1. The tragedy of Antigone 

Let’s begin with a famous Greek tragedy by Sophocles, namely, Antigone. She is daughter of the ill-fated Oedipus, the king who unknowingly killed his own father and married his mother, after learning which, he blinds himself. I briefly touched upon Antigone's story in the following article: What Is Literary Analysis?


Freud famously named the Oedipus complex after the poor guy. The family curse doesn’t end with Oedipus, it extends to his sons. Both of his sons — Eteocles and Polycines — end up dying in a battle over who should become the ruler of the city of Thebes. 


After they both die, Creon, Antigone’s uncle, is appointed king. He deems Polycines a traitor and his brother Eteocles a hero. He also passes a law making it illegal for Polycines to be granted proper burial rites on the threat of death. 


Antigone ignores his decree and chooses to bury her brother ceremonially as his corpse lies outside the walls of the city of Thebes by sprinkling dirt on the corpse. After being found out, she is condemned and sentenced to be buried alive.  Antigone asks her sister, Ismene, for help in burying her brother. She refuses, which earns her a swift rebuke from Antigone.


Antigone, Scene 1:


ANTIGONE:

I’m not going to force you, but even if you change 

Your mind, I won’t accept your help now.

Do what you think is right; I will bury him. 

It’s a beautiful thing, to die in this act.

With him I will rest, beloved with beloved, 

And I will be a god-fearing criminal. I need to please 

The gods of death more than the men on Earth,

As I will rest below forever. But if you think it best, 

Go ahead and dishonor what the gods honor. 


ISMENE:

I’m not dishonoring anyone! And even still, I’m just a woman! 

Only men get a say in how the city’s run, you know that.


ANTIGONE:  You can make that your excuse— I will bury my brother.


Ismene is a perfect foil character to Antigone. She is a woman who knows her place in an Ancient Greek social structure, where women were little more than the property of their fathers and husbands. Antigone is a hero exactly because she is not just willing to challenge the decree of Creon. She does so even as a woman when, as Ismene explains, “only men get a say in how the city’s run.” 


In Antigone, we see two aspects of the fundamental elements of tragedy: the fatal flaw and human agency. The fatal flaw, as mentioned earlier, is a failing within the character that causes their downfall. In this case, Antigone’s flaw is pride and her unwillingness to compromise. She doesn’t refrain from judging her own sister for not being eager to join her on her suicide mission to defy Creon.


In that regard, she is similar to Creon. If Creon is a tyrant in the realm of public affairs, then Antigone is just as much a tyrant in the arena of private and family affairs. Antigone comes across as mean for this ugly treatment of her sister. Why doesn’t Antigone explore other options besides openly defying a dictator. 


Antigone is engaged to Haimon, a prince and son of Creon, whom he dotes on. Why doesn’t she make an appeal to Creon through her fiancé? Why doesn’t she appeal in private to Creon, who is her uncle for some sort of compromise? 


Knowing Creon, these strategies may not have been wholly effective, but they all make more practical sense than openly defying a tyrant. It all goes back to her sense of pride and willingness to rely on her own resources without appealing to others. 


However, her pride and strong will has a loftier and more noble aspect. This nobler aspect is related to Antigone’s agency. Antigone takes the hard decision to defy Creon and honor the gods of death by burying her brother. It is her own decision. 


She wasn’t forced by the gods or some outside power to do so. It is her own personal sense of moral, religious, and familial obligation to her brother that drives her actions. In short, a tragic hero needs to have agency.


2. Tragedy in Shakespeare

The spirit of Greek tragedy was carried on in Elizabethan theater, especially in the works of Shakespeare. The plays of Shakespeare are more or less divided into comedies and tragedies, with comedies being laced with humor and having happy endings and the tragedies resembling the standard of Greek tragedy.


The Shakespearean tragedy that we will look at is Lady Macbeth from the play Macbeth. Lady Macbeth is a minor character compared to her husband Macbeth in the play. However, her story may well be even more compelling.


We see Macbeth begin as a man who agonizes as he resists his moral conscience in committing an evil act — that is, the murder of King Duncan as he sleeps as a guest under the Macbeth household in order to secure the Scottish throne. He eventually turns into a hollowed-out monster who kills on a whim as long as it means securing his hold on power.


His wife on the other hand takes a different trajectory. She begins as an accomplice confident about the need to murder King Duncan. One could go so far as the decision was less Macbeth than Lady Macbeth's, who relentlessly encourages and scolds her husband for lacking the nerve. 


In Act 2, Scene 2, Lady Macbeth urges Macbeth to smear blood on the grooms whom they have framed for killing Duncan to cover up their act. However, he has no stomach for it, unlike Lady Macbeth: 


                                                Infirm of purpose!

Give me the daggers: the sleeping and the dead

Are but as pictures: 'tis the eye of childhood

That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed,

I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal;

For it must seem their guilt.


Later, after having blood smeared all over her, she declares, “A little water clears us of this deed.” After the act, her conscience slowly haunts her until she grows insane and commits suicide. Lady Macbeth, just like Antigone, uses her agency to make a conscious decision to participate in an evil deed and suffers the consequences. 


Antigone’s decision might be seen as noble and even inspiring compared to Lady Macbeth’s morally bankrupt and cowardly act. They also differ in another aspect. Antigone has no internal incongruency or internal conflict. She is absolutely sure of herself and her decisions and actions. There is complete congruency between her internal belief system and her actions.


This is not the case for Lady Macbeth. She suppresses her own humanity and moral conscience to make an evil decision. The moral conscience that she suppresses eventually surfaces, and this drives her insane. Lady Macbeth, at the end, isn’t able to reconcile her evil deed with her moral interior. 

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3. Tragedy in the modern novel

The defining form of the tragedy in the modern era is the novel. Tragedy in the novel, however, doesn’t wholly resemble Greek tragedy. Greek tragedy is a religious and even ritualistic performance. As a result, it tends to be serious and high-minded, addressing social concerns and focusing on aristocratic and noble characters. 

 

The modern novel is less ceremonial and frequently chooses the everyday man as its protagonist. Nonetheless, the novel, just like Greek tragedy, is defined by a protagonist who has a fatal flaw, which may or may not be determined by internal conflict. 


The novel we will examine is Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart (published in 1958), and its tragic protagonist Okonkwo of Umuofia is afflicted with a fatal flaw that is defined by an internal conflict that he isn’t able to resolve. Okonkwo believes that showing tender emotion or giving in to the human instinct of compassion is unmanly behavior.


This is illustrated in the sad story of Ikemefuna. Ikemefuna is the adopted son of Okonkwo for three years, and Okonkwo grows fond of him, with the boy even calling him father. However, the Oracle of Umuofia eventually rules that Ikemefuna has to be killed as a blood sacrifice. 


You see Ikemefuna was a hostage of Umuofia serving as a sacrifice for his father, who was from another village killing a woman from Umuofia. Okwonko was chosen by the oracle to serve as the guardian of Ikemefuna. The elders warn Okonkwo not to participate in the ritual of Ikemefuna’s death even if it has to be done. 


He ignores the advice and directly kills the boy with his own hands, dealing the final fatal blow because “He was afraid of being thought weak.” He is traumatized afterward and cannot eat and sleep. During that time, he comforts himself thus: "When did you become a shivering old woman . . . How can a man who has killed five men in battle fall to pieces because he has added a boy to their number?” 


Okonkwo’s internal conflict is defined by his failure to reconcile his overcompensation as a strong man and warrior and the human need to yield to feelings of compassion and tenderness, which he takes for weakness. His bad decision to kill his own son because the gods demanded it leads to disaster. 


Okonkwo soon after accidentally kills a man’s son at that man’s funeral. As a result, according to the custom of his tribe, he has to flee with his family and return to his mother’s village and remain in exile for seven years. This can be seen as suffering the wrath of the gods for his earlier decision to kill Ikemefuna. 


When he returns to Umuofia, he finds out that the Christian missionaries have grown in influence in his absence. He tries to rally his community to war to preserve his culture against Christian missionaries, who are backed by British colonial forces. This culminates with Okonkwo killing a British colonial emissary. However, the clan of Umuofia has no fighting spirit left and fails to rally behind him. When Okonkwo realizes it, he commits suicide.

Cite this EminentEdit article

Antoine, M. (2025, July 1). What Is Tragedy? | Definition & Examples. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/what-is-tragedy



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