In Arthur Miller's “Tragedy of the Common Man” his main point is quite simple and pretty much summed up in the title: Tragedy can befall anyone, it is not just a plight of the nobility but is just as commonly expressed in the regular lives of regular people. As laid out in Miller’s writing, many of the great tragedies written about in older literature is that of kings and great heros. Some examples of this are Hamlet, Macbeth, and Oedipus. However the tragic flaws these characters might have they share with the common man as well. This is because the basis of the tragedy is people trying to change their circumstances, trying to prove their worth, or find their way in the world, and failing.
In my search for some background on this essay I found a very interesting article about how Arthur Miller wrote this essay a short time after releasing his play “Death of A Salesman”, a play that fits into this idea that the tragic flaws of the nobility applies to the common man. My original idea of what tragedy is was “Bad things happen to people” and I enjoyed reading this essay because it adds another dimension to my thoughts about the subject. The idea that subjects of tragedy have a potentially tragic flaw in their person, regardless of situation means that tragedy is more than chance, that there is more reasoning than just unfortunate circumstances.
0 Comments
“We may be suffering because we are surrounded by snobs”. This is the piece of this week's TED talk that really stuck with me, and that’s because it’s true. The concept of “snobbery”, or in more american terms “Straight up judging someone based on one thing” is a prevalent thing in society, it always has been, its context has been shifting over time. Even as our society is become more open to things like homosexuality and class there is still one thing thing people base a lot of worth on, and that is a person’s choice of career.
Exposure to this starts early on. At a young age people are often asked “what do you want to be when you grow up?”, and depending on what the answer to that question is the response you get may be less than encouraging. I’ve been subject to this for most of middle and high school. When asked by family members, friends parents, mentors, and sometimes even my teachers the question my answer has been “high school teacher” which is usually met with “no you don’t”, “don’t you want to make more money?”, “oh you are so smart you can do something better than that”. It’s incredibly frustrating, to be told that what you want to do with your life “isn’t worth it”. This is where the tragedy comes in. At a young age we begin to lose sight of things that might might make us happy in pursuit of the gaining of material things. We are living in a society that isn’t focussed on the good, but the more instead. As a student of english throughout all of high school, I feel like I should have some idea of what tragedy is. In the world we consider horrible sad things to be tragedies, things like natural disasters, acts of human cruelty, bad accidents, unexpected or early death and unfortunate circumstances. I guess lots of things can be considered tragic. This should hold true in literature too right? However, when I think about books I've read considered "tragedies" it seems that while including a mix of the things mentioned above, the characters also make a plethora of bad choices to go along with it. That might just be shakespeare though. The best way I can start to describe tragedy is in one word, unfortunate.
After reading a variety of articles the basic definition of tragedy in literature is a display of human suffering that invokes pleasure in audiences. So to fit into this I suppose most of the topics mentioned in the prior paragraph could be worked into plot in order to achieve the desired effect. To go along with my initial thought that bad choices often cause tragedy, I found examples of this while reading about “Tragedy of the Commons” and “Revenge Plays”. “Tragedy of the Commons” is when someone acts in their own interest and against the common good. This manifests in the real world in cases of overuse of natural resources and unethical business practices, but can also be applied to many situations in literature as well. Looking at “Revenge Plays” my thoughts about Shakespeare were somewhat confirmed that shakespeare characters make bad choices. However this kind of lust for vengeance is a very common type of story in literature. So while my ideas are a little more refined now, tragedy can still really be summed up as unfortunate. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |