Examples Of Inevitability In Tragedy

The inevitability in tragedy is often due as much to the hero’s stubbornness as to fate. The stubbornness of tragic heroes shows in their concern with vengeance and their unwillingness to forgive. As Aristotle said, in comedy enemies often become friends, but in tragedy they never do. If a person with a locked will or an obsession appears in a comedy, by contrast, it’s not as a hero to be admired, but as the butt of joking. Characters with idées fixes, as Bergson called them, the miser, the pedant, and the hypochondriac. What’s valued in comedy is not “staying the course,” to use George W. Bush’s phrase, but adapting thought and behavior to what’s happening. Like tragic heroes, comic protagonists face big problems, but they think rather than

Ambiguity is shunned and everything should be clear and have one meaning (Martin 176) Tragedy goes for the truth about each thing and situation, and for absolute truth rather than relative truth. Comedy, by contrast, is not put off by ambiguity and multiple meanings. In fact, it uses them regularly without them there could be no jokes. In comedy there is no obsession with reaching the absolute truth about anything, if that notion even makes sense in comedy. Harvey Cox has written that wherever we “live at the vortex of multiple worlds of meaning, the comic is possible. Only in a closed, monolithic universe is it excluded.”(155). Ambiguity is important in characters, too, as Conrad Hyers in his seminal book on the comic vision in The Bible has argued.

“Comedy mixes and confounds all rigid categories and fixed identities,” as in Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, at once an aristocrat and a bum. Clowns generally are mixtures. Comic protagonists are flexible and “the comic virtues they embody, from laughter to love, are made possible because they embody a greater appreciation for the muddiness of human nature and the ambiguities of human truth and

So at the same time they were developing tragedy, the Greeks developed comedy, the first institution to challenge militarism and the heroic ethos. Satyr plays satirized mythic heroes. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata mocked tribal militarism and patriarchy. In early film, many of Charlie Chaplin’s comedies ridiculed war as a way to solve problems. Later came Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; How I Won the War .The comic critics of militarism often take on its inherent sexism, too, as in Lysistrata, the first feminist play. While men dominate in tragedy and epic, comedy features women in leading roles, and female characters are more varied and interesting. Comedies also mock hierarchies and elitism. Tragedy concentrates on upper-class heroes of noble birth like Oedipus and Hamlet; comedy celebrates what we now call diversity, where each person counts for one. Since ancient Greek and Roman comedy, for example, servants have bested their masters. Mary Leech emphasizes the social function of comedy: “It alleviates social fears, draws a community together by defining its values, and often works as a critique of a culture in a non-threatening manner” (105). Comedy challenges the audience to examine its values and become more thoughtful about its principles. In the Greek times, comedy was an important platform for the civilians to participate