final exam assignment

LITR 4533 TRAGEDY  Final Exam Samples 2010 Essays & Excerpts on Part A: Overall Learning Experience

Allison Evans

Shades of Grey

Throughout this course I have learned more than I expected to about genres in general and more specifically the genre of Tragedy. Walking into this course I felt as though I knew the basics behind tragedies, and that was based upon the idea that tragedies showed only the darker side of the world and cut out the unrealistic ideals of riding off into the sunset with your prince to live happily-ever-after. At that point the only stand out characteristic in my mind to describe a tragedy was the darkness and sadness the audience felt for the hero.

During our time in class we discussed several traits of tragedies and the characters within them. One of the most interesting traits to me that we have gone over pertains to the characters’ state of mind. I love how tragedies make it so that no person is completely good or completely bad. Most of the characters have both redeeming and evil features. This trait allows the characters to become more relatable to the audience personalizing the issues at hand. The issues that the main characters face are often full of complications that make any answer both right and wrong depending on the point of view the audience member has. 

If you look at the story the Oresteia we see this first hand. Agamemnon was faced with an extremely tough decision. He had to choose whether to kill the hundreds of men he had already sent off to war who were at sea, or sacrifice his daughter. He chose that the good of his country and all of those men outweighed the need to keep his daughter alive. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. There was no right or wrong answer to this predicament, and both of the solutions Agamemnon had entailed hurting those around him dearly. This aspect of a more humanized conflict is one that has not been brought to light in my reading of several known tragedies such as Hamlet. In reading Hamlet in particular, the focus was always on the mental state of Hamlet or the deception that occurred, never the complicated conflicts and decisions that each of the characters had to face that would result in action. According to Aristotle, “…tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action . . . . Now character determines men's qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse” (Aristotle’s Poetics).

Sharing the focus between the characters’ internal conflict and the characters’ actions allows the imitation of life to be clear. According to Newton’s law of motion, for every action there is an equal reaction. While this formula is meant mainly to handle the questions of movement in the physics world, it can be used to explore characters’ actions in the literary world. For example, the concept of revenge as seen in tragedies goes round and round in a circle. In the Oresteia every action leads to a reaction; Agamemnon’s action to sacrifice his daughter lead to his wife’s reaction and decision to kill him. Clytemnestra’s action to kill her husband leads to her son and daughter’s reaction to in turn murder her, which leads to infuriating the furies which further leads to the trial which ultimately ends the circle of action through forgiveness.

Something else I found to be interesting relating specifically to the genre of tragedy was the use and repression of spectacles. Often in the Greek and Roman tragedies, the violent action would happen off stage and the audience understood the progression of action leading up to the violence through the statements of another character, typically a chorus member. There is a very similar occurrence of this in the more recent tragedies that we reviewed in the course. In Pay It Forward, the main character, a young boy was stabbed by a bully while trying to protect his friend. In his death, all he did was lie onto the ground. There was no screaming from him, no last minute curses, and there was not even a large appearance of blood. Also in the play, Desire Under the Elms, we read about the main woman character who suffocated her baby. There was no scene made out of the actual death and it was nothing other than her placing a pillow over the child. The baby didn’t cry or make a scene.

Moving away from the specific genre of tragedy and onto genres as a whole, I learned quite a lot. The main thing that I discovered over the semester was that what constitutes a work of art being within a certain genre will never be set in stone. I also became aware of just how often in works of literature that genres merge together and mingle to create an intriguing text.

While I am learned a lot about the genre of tragedy and its characteristics, I have to work on understanding there are two sides to the conflicts in a tragedy, and that these conflicts are not always black and white. Several times I have read something and just said, “Well that’s completely wrong”, or “That’s the right answer”, with no real thought to what went into the character’s decision or the good that the other choice could have brought into the situation.  My growth in this area occurred mainly through class discussions. Hearing the other students’ ideas and perspectives about what was going on in a text allowed me to re-evaluate the situation that the character was in and to see the text in a different way. This is allowed me to be more vocal during the group discussions, something I have not previously done. Before, I would always remain quiet during group discussions, afraid to share my opinion about the reading that might be wrong or seen as completely off base by my peers and teachers. In this course, I was able to open up more and participate in the discussions that were going on in the classroom. I felt as though while I was still shy in several aspects, I was able to not feel as embarrassed about sharing an opinion or thought that I had. 

Also, the way in which I read the story which I presented in front of the class was different than how I read the previous stories, and I found that the closer reading of the material really made things more interesting in my own mind, from within the text. It helped me to understand that I should be reading all of my texts with the intentions of being able to answer my peers’ and teachers’ questions about them, which could allow and prepare me for a more in-depth and involved discussions.

Overall, my knowledge of tragedies and genres has grown considerably over the semester, as well as my academic skills. I am excited to be able to take this growth of knowledge and apply it to my future courses and literary experiences.