A tragic character, or tragic hero, is a protagonist whose own error or flaw brings about their downfall. The idea comes from Aristotle's Poetics (c. 335 BCE), which describes the best figure for a tragedy as neither a saint nor a villain but a person of high standing whose misfortune comes “not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty,” so that the fall moves the audience to pity and fear. Oedipus, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear are the classic examples. Jay Gatsby is the American one most often named, in the phrase's later, looser sense.
The phrase itself came after Aristotle: S. H. Butcher's translation of the Poetics, quoted throughout this page, never uses “tragic hero.” Below are Aristotle's account and the Greek terms that come with it, four classic tragic heroes traced through them, and then the modern uses, from Gatsby to Willy Loman, which keep some of his terms and drop others.
Aristotle's tragic hero
The Poetics defines tragedy before it describes the kind of person a tragedy needs.
Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.
For Aristotle the plot comes first, “the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy,” and the hero is chosen to make the plot work on the audience. In Chapter XIII he rules out the alternatives. A good man falling into misery “moves neither pity nor fear; it merely shocks us.” A villain's downfall “would, doubtless, satisfy the moral sense, but it would inspire neither pity nor fear.” What remains is a person in between.
…that of a man who is not eminently good and just,—yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty.
He must also be “highly renowned and prosperous,” a man like Oedipus, so that he has far to fall, and the change must run “not from bad to good, but, reversely, from good to bad.” Pity, Aristotle explains, “is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves.” The tragic hero has to be both: undeserving of so much suffering, and close enough to us that we flinch.
The play Aristotle keeps returning to shows the two key moves of the plot at once. In Sophocles' Oedipus the King, a messenger arrives from Corinth to cheer Oedipus with news that the king he believes is his father has died, and to free him of his fear of marrying his mother. In explaining that Oedipus was adopted, the messenger sets off the discovery of who he really is. “Thus in the Oedipus,” Aristotle writes, “the messenger comes to cheer Oedipus and free him from his alarms about his mother, but by revealing who he is, he produces the opposite effect.” Good news that turns into its opposite is the reversal. Oedipus learning the truth about himself is the recognition, which Aristotle defines as “a change from ignorance to knowledge,” and he thought the two work best together: “The best form of recognition is coincident with a Reversal of the Situation, as in the Oedipus.”
The elements of a tragic hero
| Term | Butcher's English | What it means | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| TermHamartia | Butcher's English“error or frailty” | What it meansThe hero's own mistake or flaw, which sets the fall going | ExampleOthello trusts Iago and doubts Desdemona |
| TermPeripeteia | Butcher's English“Reversal of the Situation” | What it meansAn action that turns into its opposite | ExampleThe messenger who comes to cheer Oedipus (Aristotle's own example) |
| TermAnagnorisis | Butcher's English“Recognition” | What it meansA change from ignorance to knowledge | ExampleOedipus learns who his parents are |
| TermCatharsis | Butcher's English“purgation” | What it meansThe release of pity and fear the audience is left with | ExampleThe close of any of these plays |
| TermPathos | Butcher's English“the Scene of Suffering” | What it means“A destructive or painful action” | ExampleOedipus blinds himself |
Hamartia: an error, not wickedness
Butcher's “error or frailty” leaves room for both readings people still argue over: a mistake made in ignorance, or a flaw of character. Oedipus's error is mostly ignorance. Macbeth's is an ambition he knows is wrong. Othello's is a trusting nature that Iago turns against him. The character flaws list has a section of fatal flaws, from hubris to vengefulness, each with the classic character it ruined.
Catharsis
Butcher translates katharsis as “purgation”; others have read it as purification or clarification. Whichever word you prefer, it names what the audience leaves with: pity and fear raised to a pitch and then released. School lists often add hubris, excessive pride, and nemesis, the punishment that answers it. Neither is among the parts of a plot Aristotle names (reversal, recognition and the scene of suffering), but both are useful words for what happens to many tragic heroes.
Tragic hero examples
Oedipus
King of Thebes and the man who saved it from the Sphinx, Oedipus swears to find the killer of the old king, Laius, and curses him in public. Every step of his search brings him closer to himself.
Ah me! ah me! all brought to pass, all true!
O light, may I behold thee nevermore!
I stand a wretch, in birth, in wedlock cursed,
A parricide, incestuously, triply cursed!
The king who could answer the Sphinx's riddle could not answer his own. His determination to know the truth, the quality that made him a great ruler, is exactly what ruins him.
Macbeth
Macbeth's error is ambition, and the reversal comes from the prophecies that made him feel safe. He has been told no man born of a woman can harm him.
Macbeth: I bear a charmed life, which must not yield,
To one of woman born.
Macduff: Despair thy charm;
And let the angel whom thou still hast served
Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother's womb
Untimely ripp'd.
Macbeth: And be these juggling fiends no more believed,
That palter with us in a double sense;
That keep the word of promise to our ear,
And break it to our hope.
Reversal and recognition land in one exchange: the charm becomes the sentence, and Macbeth sees in the same breath that the witches spoke in double meanings. For how his decline builds act by act, see the character arc guide, where he is the example of a corruption arc.
Othello
Then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought,
Perplex'd in the extreme
Othello is a general the state can't do without and a man who believes what he is told. Iago works on the second quality, and the recognition comes only after Desdemona is dead and Emilia exposes the handkerchief plot: “O fool! fool! fool!” His last speech asks the survivors to tell the story right. A tragic hero's final act is often a request for a witness.
King Lear
In the first act Lear demands proof of love, banishes the daughter who won't perform it, and curses the next one who crosses him, so that she may feel “How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is / To have a thankless child!” By the fourth act, waking in Cordelia's care, he has changed.
Lear: If you have poison for me, I will drink it.
I know you do not love me; for your sisters
Have, as I do remember, done me wrong.
You have some cause, they have not.
Cordelia: No cause, no cause.
The king who once asked to be told how much he was loved now expects to be poisoned, and the daughter he wronged won't even let him say she has cause. The recognition is real and it comes too late. By the last scene Cordelia is dead, and the cost of Lear's error falls hardest on the daughter who refused to flatter him. In arc terms Lear learns, which is a positive change, inside a plot that destroys him anyway.
Modern tragic heroes
Aristotle wanted heroes “highly renowned and prosperous,” which in Greek tragedy meant kings. Modern uses of “tragic hero” keep some of the shape and drop the crown. Arthur Miller made the case in his essay “Tragedy and the Common Man,” published in The New York Times on February 27, 1949, less than three weeks after Death of a Salesman opened on Broadway: an ordinary man can be as fit a subject for tragedy as a king. Miller's Willy Loman is a traveling salesman.
| Character | Work | The error | The fall |
|---|---|---|---|
| CharacterWilly Loman | WorkDeath of a Salesman (1949) | The errorClings to a dream of success by being liked | The fallRuins his sons' faith and ends his own life |
| CharacterOkonkwo | WorkThings Fall Apart (1958) | The errorTerror of seeming weak | The fallViolence that cuts him off from his own people |
| CharacterMichael Corleone | WorkThe Godfather films (1972–90) | The errorProtects his family by taking over its business | The fallLoses the family he meant to protect |
| CharacterWalter White | WorkBreaking Bad (2008–13) | The errorPride that outgrows his first reason | The fallDestroys his family and himself |
| CharacterAnakin Skywalker | WorkStar Wars prequel trilogy (1999–2005) | The errorFear of losing the people he loves | The fallBecomes what he fought and loses them anyway |
Jay Gatsby
Gatsby is a tragic hero in the later, looser sense: an admired figure undone by a dream he can't give up. Measured against Aristotle, the fit is partial. His standing is self-made, money and fame rather than the renown of a royal house. His error is real, the belief that he can recover the past with Daisy, and it costs him his life. But Nick Carraway's verdict in the first chapter pulls against the idea of an error at all: “Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams…” In Nick's telling, the fault lies less in the man than in what preyed on him.
Gatsby also gets no recognition scene of his own. Nick can only guess at it: “If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.” Aristotle's tragedy works “in the form of action, not of narrative.” Fitzgerald's works through a narrator, and the seeing passes to the witness.
Tragic hero vs anti-hero and villain
| Tragic hero | Anti-hero | Villain | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starts as | Tragic heroAdmirable, often powerful | Anti-heroFlawed, unheroic | VillainOpposed to the protagonist |
| Falls because of | Tragic heroAn error or flaw of their own | Anti-heroMay not fall at all | VillainDefeat, if the story allows it |
| The audience feels | Tragic heroPity and fear | Anti-heroSympathy, despite disapproval | VillainDread, then relief |
| Example | Tragic heroOthello | Anti-heroHuck Finn | VillainIago |
Aristotle's test separates the tragic hero from the villain: a villain's fall satisfies the moral sense and inspires neither pity nor fear. The other categories can overlap. Heathcliff is a Byronic anti-hero whose story ends in a fall, and a villain told from inside can approach tragedy when the audience sees what he once was.
How to write a tragic hero
- Show the greatness first
Othello has won the state's wars and Desdemona's love before Iago starts work. The reader has to see the height before the fall, or the fall is only a drop.
- Grow the error out of a virtue
Othello's openness, Lear's hunger for love, Oedipus's need to know. The quality that made the hero great should be the one that ruins them.
- Give them a warning and a choice
Tiresias tells Oedipus the truth early. Banquo hears the same prophecy as Macbeth and does nothing with it, a foil who proves the choice was Macbeth's. Without a choice, the fall reads as bad luck.
- Build the reversal from their own act
The plan should turn into its opposite: the search that finds the searcher, the prophecy that protects until it kills. Plant it early so the turn feels inevitable, not arranged.
- Time the recognition
Put it in the same scene as the reversal if you can. If it comes later, as Lear's does, make it arrive just too late to save what matters.
- Let the cost reach others, and leave a witness
Desdemona and Cordelia pay for errors that aren't theirs. Then someone has to survive and tell it, as Othello asks. Catharsis needs a point of view.
- Greatness: Marcus Bell, 58, has been mayor of a Missouri river town for twenty years. In the flood of his first term he walked the levee all night with the sandbag crews, and the town still tells the story.
- Hamartia: he trusts his own read of the river over anyone's numbers, because he has always been right.
- Warning: a young hydrologist, Priya Nand, shows him that the north levee will fail at a crest he has survived before.
- Choice: he delays the evacuation one night to spare the town a panic he is sure it doesn't need.
- Reversal: the sandbag wall he orders to save the north levee sends the water into the low streets of the south side, the neighborhood he grew up in.
- Recognition: at dawn, on the levee, he sees that he has been reading the river of twenty years ago.
- Cost: the south side floods to the second floors, and the people who trusted him most lose their homes.
- Witness: Priya testifies at the inquiry, and the book ends with her account of the man he was that first night.
His error grows out of the virtue the town loves him for, and the reversal comes from his own order. There is no villain in the story, and the tragedy doesn't need one: the fall comes from the hero's error.
Mistakes that flatten a tragedy
- Bad luck instead of an error. A good person ruined through no error of their own, Aristotle says, “merely shocks us.” Give the fall a choice.
- A villain in a hero's costume. If the hero is simply wicked, the reader feels relief at the end, not pity.
- No one sees. Without a recognition, the hero's or a witness's, the ending is a crash, not a tragedy.
- The flaw announced, not used. If the narrator says the hero is proud but no scene turns on the pride, the fall will feel arbitrary.
- Deaths without causes. A pile of bodies is melodrama. Each loss should follow from the hero's choices. Map them on a plot diagram (the plot structure guide shows Freytag's pyramid, drawn from five-act tragedy) and check that every death sits downstream of a decision.
A tragedy's parts are spread across a whole manuscript: the greatness in chapter 2, the error in chapter 9, the warning in chapter 14, the reversal and recognition near the end. Keep a short outline with the parts from this page and the chapter where each one happens. The character profile template has fields for the flaw and the arc.
With that outline attached, the Strokes Assistant can review the draft and point to the places where the fall depends on chance, where the error appears only in narration, or where the recognition arrives with nothing to set it up.
Frequently asked questions
What are the characteristics of a tragic hero?
A common classroom list has six: high standing, a hamartia (an error or flaw), a reversal of fortune, a recognition, a downfall worse than the hero deserves, and catharsis, the pity and fear the audience is left with. The list is a later summary. Aristotle's Poetics describes the plot and the kind of person it needs rather than a checklist. Many lists also add hubris.
What is hamartia?
Hamartia is the term Aristotle uses in the Poetics for the cause of the tragic hero's fall. S. H. Butcher translated it as error or frailty. It can mean a mistake made in ignorance, as with Oedipus, or a flaw of character, such as Othello's credulity or Macbeth's ambition. Either way, it belongs to the hero, not to a villain.
Is Gatsby a tragic hero?
In the looser modern sense, yes: an admired figure undone by a dream he won't give up. By Aristotle's stricter account he fits only partly. He falls through his own error, the belief that he can recover the past with Daisy, and suffers far more than he deserves, but his standing is self-made and he gets no recognition scene. Fitzgerald gives the seeing to Nick Carraway.
Can a woman be a tragic hero?
Yes. Greek tragedy has Sophocles' Antigone, and later tragic heroines include Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. The shape is the same as for any tragic hero: standing, an error of their own, a reversal, and a recognition that comes too late to change the ending.
