Tragic Heroes in Oedipus the K

In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, the tragic hero is most certainly Oedipus. Oedipus, first of all, is a good man. When he declares, “My spirit grieves for the city” (l 75-76), he expresses a deep compassion that can only be associated with the epitome of goodness. His sympathy for his people and his desire to be their savior suggests Oedipus is a noble man, and with this nobility, he earns the respect and love of the audience. The respect

In Ibsen’s A Doll House, the tragic hero is not as easily distinguished. However, despite similarities between the plights of Nora and Torvald, Nora proves a better candidate. A character of wealth, Nora clearly fits the traditional characteristic of a tragic hero’s high state of being. The one flaw that Nora has is her inability to discern reality from illusion. From the beginning of the play, Nora’s rather giddy and childish behavior expresses a rather suspicious state of happiness to the audience. Despite her husband’s rather oppressive name-calling, giving her names like “little skylark,” “featherbrained woman,” and “helpless little mortal,” she expresses a false sense of happiness through her constant charades of dancing and laughing with her husband (I). Her inability to live truthfully is a testament to her inability to tell Torvald the true farce that has embodied their marriage for eight years. Because of this flaw, the conflict between reality and illusion becomes so out of control that saving the marriage would be impossible to do. Nora is forced to relinquish everything in her life: her home, her marriage, and her children. Nora’s downfall not only involves losing everything, but she becomes thrown into the real world, where she will be shunned for breaking the social contract of wifehood and motherhood. Though Nora experiences a tragic reversal of fortunes, plunged into loneliness and scorn from society, again, like Oedipus and Creon, her downfall is not a complete loss. She, too, has a catharsis and realizes that her life as been a charade, and though she may have to start life over amidst the angry jury of society, she realizes that she must learn to find herself, so as not to live falsely again.

of the audience is crucial in generating the tragic effect that comes with a tragic hero’s downfall, and Sophocles utilizes this by means of giving Oedipus human qualities and a tragic flaw. Compassionate, yet stubborn, he is certainly not superhuman, showing consistent strengths and weaknesses; for this, the audience has no reason to feel isolated from his situation. In the case of his tragic flaw, his lack of knowledge of his true identity is coupled with the audience’s preconceived awareness of his fate. Thus, when Oedipus

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