Here is the synopsis of our sample research paper on Are Oedipus, Hamlet and Willy Loman Tragic Heroes?. Have the paper e-mailed to you 24/7/365.
Essay / Research Paper Abstract
A 2.5 page paper which considers whether or not three of literature’s most famous characters are tragic heroes, and if so, why. Bibliography lists 4 sources.
Page Count:
2 pages (~225 words per page)
File: TG15_TGtraghe.rtf
Buy This Term Paper »
Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
type of flaw (hamartia) that made him so. While this tragic flaw in the Greek classics was often described as hubris or excessive pride, it could be also be
any shortsighted act that had serious repercussions not only for the hero but also for the people closest to him. In his 1949 essay, "Tragedy and the Common Man,"
playwright Arthur Miller examined what seemed to be at that time the bygone art of tragic literature, which seemed to have disappeared with the Greek classics. Miller defines tragedy
and the tragic hero as "the consequence of a mans total compulsion to evaluate himself justly. In the sense of having been initiated by the hero himself, the tale
always reveals what has been called his tragic flaw," a failing that is not peculiar to grand or elevated characters. Nor is it necessarily a weakness. The flaw, or crack
in the character, is really nothing--and need be nothing, but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity,
his image of his rightful status" (3). Under the Greek concept of hubris, Oedipus would certainly qualify as a tragic hero. His pride, which leads him to attempt
to save Thebes from a devastating plague by exposing the murderer of his predecessor, King Laius, set off the unfortunate chain of events that would reveal himself to be the
murderer, and guilty of the crime of incest, since unbeknownst to Oedipus, Laius was his biological father which meant that his wife Jocasta (the kings widow) was his birth mother.
Had Oedipus listened to the warnings of his oracle, Teiresias, and not been blinded literally or figuratively by pride, a devastated Jocasta would not have committed suicide, their children
...