Tragedy In Oedipus Rex

3 Pages 762 Words

If we look closer at the term ‘tragedy’ it represents serious and important actions, which turn out disastrously for the protagonist. From this definition we can clearly label Millers’ ‘Death of a Salesman’ and Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus Tyrannus’ as tragedies in their own right. Dramatic tragedy from ancient times to the nineteenth century generally has one central character who moves from good to bad fortune, through suffering to awareness.
Sophocles wrote ‘Oedipus Tyrannus’, a classical tragedy during a period of both extraordinary intellectual and artistic energy and crisis. Under its leader Pericles, Athens became the most powerful city-state in Greece. In a society as deeply traditional as ancient Greece, old ways of thinking often persist alongside the new, thus Greek tragedy and particularly Sophoclean tragedy is a kind of dialogue between the old and the new. According to Aristotle,
‘The plot of Greek tragedy involves the fall of a noble man caused by hamartia.’
Oedipus has essential features of a tragic hero; moral stature and greatness of personality. Willy Loman does not possess either moral stature or greatness of personality; he seems more pathetic and ‘worm-like’ than respected. This may be one of the reasons why the twentieth century tragedy ‘Death of a Salesman’ has been neglected the title of a ‘tragedy’ by some critics. Miller himself has stated,
“The inevitable conclusion is, of course, that the tragic mode is archaic, fit only for the very highly placed, the kings or the kingly..”
This may be true when we think of other tragic literature; Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth were all of high stature. Euripides wrote, ‘sad stories of great men last longer.’ In this case Willy Loman would not have been a memorable character at all.
Oedipus’s suffering and defeat does arouse both pity and fear. We feel pity because he is not in control of his downfall: the Gods determine his forthco...