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5 moving, beautiful essays about death and dying

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It is never easy to contemplate the end-of-life, whether its own our experience or that of a loved one.

This has made a recent swath of beautiful essays a surprise. In different publications over the past few weeks,  I've stumbled upon writers who were  contemplating final days. These are, no doubt, hard stories to read. I had to take breaks as I read about Paul Kalanithi's experience facing metastatic lung cancer while parenting a toddler, and was devastated as I followed Liz Lopatto's contemplations on how to give her ailing cat the best death possible. But I also learned so much from reading these essays, too, about what it means to have a good death versus a difficult end from those forced to grapple with the issue. These are four stories that have stood out to me recently, alongside one essay from a few years ago that sticks with me today.

My Own Life | Oliver Sacks

As recently as last month, popular author and neurologist Oliver Sacks was in great health, even swimming a mile every day. Then, everything changed: the 81-year-old was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. In a beautiful op-ed , published in late February in the New York Times, he describes his state of mind and how he'll face his final moments. What I liked about this essay is how Sacks describes how his world view shifts as he sees his time on earth getting shorter, and how he thinks about the value of his time.

Before I go | Paul Kalanithi

Kalanthi began noticing symptoms — "weight loss, fevers, night sweats, unremitting back pain, cough" — during his sixth year of residency as a neurologist at Stanford. A CT scan revealed metastatic lung cancer. Kalanthi writes about his daughter, Cady and how he "probably won't live long enough for her to have a memory of me." Much of his essay focuses on an interesting discussion of time, how it's become a double-edged sword. Each day, he sees his daughter grow older, a joy. But every day is also one that brings him closer to his likely death from cancer.

As I lay dying | Laurie Becklund

Becklund's essay was published posthumonously after her death on February 8 of this year. One of the unique issues she grapples with is how to discuss her terminal diagnosis with others and the challenge of not becoming defined by a disease. "Who would ever sign another book contract with a dying woman?" she writes. "Or remember Laurie Becklund, valedictorian, Fulbright scholar, former Times staff writer who exposed the Salvadoran death squads and helped The Times win a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots? More important, and more honest, who would ever again look at me just as Laurie?"

Everything I know about a good death I learned from my cat | Liz Lopatto

Dorothy Parker was Lopatto's cat, a stray adopted from a local vet. And Dorothy Parker, known mostly as Dottie, died peacefully when she passed away earlier this month. Lopatto's essay is, in part, about what she learned about end-of-life care for humans from her cat. But perhaps more than that, it's also about the limitations of how much her experience caring for a pet can transfer to caring for another person.

Yes, Lopatto's essay is about a cat rather than a human being. No, it does not make it any easier to read. She describes in searing detail about the experience of caring for another being at the end of life. "Dottie used to weigh almost 20 pounds; she now weighs six," Lopatto writes. "My vet is right about Dottie being close to death, that it’s probably a matter of weeks rather than months."

Letting Go | Atul Gawande

"Letting Go" is a beautiful, difficult true story of death. You know from the very first sentence — "Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die" — that it is going to be tragic. This story has long been one of my favorite pieces of health care journalism because it grapples so starkly with the difficult realities of end-of-life care.

In the story, Monopoli is diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, a surprise for a non-smoking young woman. It's a devastating death sentence: doctors know that lung cancer that advanced is terminal. Gawande knew this too — Monpoli was his patient. But actually discussing this fact with a young patient with a newborn baby seemed impossible.

"Having any sort of discussion where you begin to say, 'look you probably only have a few months to live. How do we make the best of that time without giving up on the options that you have?' That was a conversation I wasn't ready to have," Gawande recounts of the case in a new Frontline documentary .

What's tragic about Monopoli's case was, of course, her death at an early age, in her 30s. But the tragedy that Gawande hones in on — the type of tragedy we talk about much less — is how terribly Monopoli's last days played out.

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Essays About Death: Top 5 Examples and 9 Essay Prompts

Death includes mixed emotions and endless possibilities. If you are writing essays about death, see our examples and prompts in this article.

Over 50 million people die yearly from different causes worldwide. It’s a fact we must face when the time comes. Although the subject has plenty of dire connotations, many are still fascinated by death, enough so that literary pieces about it never cease. Every author has a reason why they want to talk about death. Most use it to put their grievances on paper to help them heal from losing a loved one. Some find writing and reading about death moving, transformative, or cathartic.

To help you write a compelling essay about death, we prepared five examples to spark your imagination:

1. Essay on Death Penalty by Aliva Manjari

2. coping with death essay by writer cameron, 3. long essay on death by prasanna, 4. because i could not stop for death argumentative essay by writer annie, 5. an unforgettable experience in my life by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 1. life after death, 2. death rituals and ceremonies, 3. smoking: just for fun or a shortcut to the grave, 4. the end is near, 5. how do people grieve, 6. mental disorders and death, 7. are you afraid of death, 8. death and incurable diseases, 9. if i can pick how i die.

“The death penalty is no doubt unconstitutional if imposed arbitrarily, capriciously, unreasonably, discriminatorily, freakishly or wantonly, but if it is administered rationally, objectively and judiciously, it will enhance people’s confidence in criminal justice system.”

Manjari’s essay considers the death penalty as against the modern process of treating lawbreakers, where offenders have the chance to reform or defend themselves. Although the author is against the death penalty, she explains it’s not the right time to abolish it. Doing so will jeopardize social security. The essay also incorporates other relevant information, such as the countries that still have the death penalty and how they are gradually revising and looking for alternatives.

You might also be interested in our list of the best war books .

“How a person copes with grief is affected by the person’s cultural and religious background, coping skills, mental history, support systems, and the person’s social and financial status.”

Cameron defines coping and grief through sharing his personal experience. He remembers how their family and close friends went through various stages of coping when his Aunt Ann died during heart surgery. Later in his story, he mentions Ann’s last note, which she wrote before her surgery, in case something terrible happens. This note brought their family together again through shared tears and laughter. You can also check out these articles about cancer .

“Luckily or tragically, we are completely sentenced to death. But there is an interesting thing; we don’t have the knowledge of how the inevitable will strike to have a conversation.”

Prasanna states the obvious – all people die, but no one knows when. She also discusses the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Research also shows that when people die, the brain either shows a flashback of life or sees a ray of light.

Even if someone can predict the day of their death, it won’t change how the people who love them will react. Some will cry or be numb, but in the end, everyone will have to accept the inevitable. The essay ends with the philosophical belief that the soul never dies and is reborn in a new identity and body. You can also check out these elegy examples .

“People have busy lives, and don’t think of their own death, however, the speaker admits that she was willing to put aside her distractions and go with death. She seemed to find it pretty charming.”

The author focuses on how Emily Dickinson ’s “ Because I Could Not Stop for Death ” describes death. In the poem, the author portrays death as a gentle, handsome, and neat man who picks up a woman with a carriage to take her to the grave. The essay expounds on how Dickinson uses personification and imagery to illustrate death.

“The death of a loved one is one of the hardest things an individual can bring themselves to talk about; however, I will never forget that day in the chapter of my life, as while one story continued another’s ended.”

The essay delve’s into the author’s recollection of their grandmother’s passing. They recount the things engrained in their mind from that day –  their sister’s loud cries, the pounding and sinking of their heart, and the first time they saw their father cry. 

Looking for more? Check out these essays about losing a loved one .

9 Easy Writing Prompts on Essays About Death

Are you still struggling to choose a topic for your essay? Here are prompts you can use for your paper:

Your imagination is the limit when you pick this prompt for your essay. Because no one can confirm what happens to people after death, you can create an essay describing what kind of world exists after death. For instance, you can imagine yourself as a ghost that lingers on the Earth for a bit. Then, you can go to whichever place you desire and visit anyone you wish to say proper goodbyes to first before crossing to the afterlife.

Every country, religion, and culture has ways of honoring the dead. Choose a tribe, religion, or place, and discuss their death rituals and traditions regarding wakes and funerals. Include the reasons behind these activities. Conclude your essay with an opinion on these rituals and ceremonies but don’t forget to be respectful of everyone’s beliefs. 

Smoking is still one of the most prevalent bad habits since tobacco’s creation in 1531 . Discuss your thoughts on individuals who believe there’s nothing wrong with this habit and inadvertently pass secondhand smoke to others. Include how to avoid chain-smokers and if we should let people kill themselves through excessive smoking. Add statistics and research to support your claims.

Collate people’s comments when they find out their death is near. Do this through interviews, and let your respondents list down what they’ll do first after hearing the simulated news. Then, add their reactions to your essay.

There is no proper way of grieving. People grieve in their way. Briefly discuss death and grieving at the start of your essay. Then, narrate a personal experience you’ve had with grieving to make your essay more relatable. Or you can compare how different people grieve. To give you an idea, you can mention that your father’s way of grieving is drowning himself in work while your mom openly cries and talk about her memories of the loved one who just passed away. 

Explain how people suffering from mental illnesses view death. Then, measure it against how ordinary people see the end. Include research showing death rates caused by mental illnesses to prove your point. To make organizing information about the topic more manageable, you can also focus on one mental illness and relate it to death.

Check out our guide on  how to write essays about depression .

Sometimes, seriously ill people say they are no longer afraid of death. For others, losing a loved one is even more terrifying than death itself. Share what you think of death and include factors that affected your perception of it.

People with incurable diseases are often ready to face death. For this prompt, write about individuals who faced their terminal illnesses head-on and didn’t let it define how they lived their lives. You can also review literary pieces that show these brave souls’ struggle and triumph. A great series to watch is “ My Last Days .”

You might also be interested in these epitaph examples .

No one knows how they’ll leave this world, but if you have the chance to choose how you part with your loved ones, what will it be? Probe into this imagined situation. For example, you can write: “I want to die at an old age, surrounded by family and friends who love me. I hope it’ll be a peaceful death after I’ve done everything I wanted in life.”

To make your essay more intriguing, put unexpected events in it. Check out these plot twist ideas .

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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Article contents

• Alberto Toscano Alberto Toscano Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1100
• Published online: 22 November 2019

From Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics onward, tragedy has loomed large in the genealogy of literary theory. But this prominence is in many regards paradoxical. The original object of that theory, the Attic tragedies performed at the Dionysian festivals in 5th- century bce Athens, are, notwithstanding their ubiquitous representation on the modern stage, only a small fraction of the tragedies produced in Athens, and are themselves torn from their context of performance. The Poetics and the plays that served as its objects of analysis would long vanish from the purview of European culture. Yet, when they returned in the Renaissance as cultural monuments to be appropriated and repeated, it was in a context largely incommensurable with their existence in Ancient Greece. While the early moderns created their own poetics (and politics) of tragedy and enlisted their image of the Ancients in the invention of exquisitely modern literary and artistic forms (not least, opera), it was in the crucible of German Idealism and Romanticism, arguably the matrix of modern literary theory, that certain Ancient Greek tragedies were transmuted into models of “the tragic,” an idea that played a formative part in the emergence of philosophical modernity, accompanying a battle of the giants between dialectical (Hegelian) and antidialectical (Nietzschean) currents that continues to shape our theoretical present. The gap between a philosophy of the tragic and the poetics and history of tragedy as a dramatic genre is the site of much rich and provocative debate, in which the definition of literary theory itself is frequently at stake. Tragedy is in this sense usefully defined as a genre in conflict. It is also a genre of conflict, in the sense that ethical conflicts, historical transitions, and political revolutions have all come to define its literary forms, something that is particularly evident in the place of both tragedy and the tragic in the dramas of decolonization.

• decolonization

Between Ethics and Poetics

The entrance of tragedy into the purview of Ancient Greek philosophy took two very distinct modalities that would leave an important mark on its afterlives as an object of literary theory. Following Jacques Rancière’s account of the different regimes for the identification of art, we can refer to these as ethical and poetic theorizations of tragedy, respectively consolidated in Book III of Plato’s Republic and in the first and only extant half of Aristotle’s Poetics . Both philosophers interrogated tragedy in terms of the concept of mimesis (roughly: imitation), but Plato’s preoccupation was principally with the compatibility of imitative practices with the constitution of a just city ( polis ) whereas Aristotle sought to locate tragedy within a broader classification, analysis, and normative criticism of the varieties or genres of poetry.

The question of genre emerges in the Republic in the prescriptive context of a dialogue centering on the pedagogical suitability, for the raising of the city’s ruling class (the “guardians”), of different imitative practices. As Socrates declares to his interlocutor Adeimantus: “One kind of poetry and story-telling employs only imitation—tragedy and comedy, as you say. Another kind employs only narration by the poet himself—you find this most of all in dithyrambs. A third kind uses both—as in epic poetry and many other places.” 1 Now, while this tripartition originates in Plato’s doctrine of ideas and his dialectical method, it is also grounded in a political anthropology (or political psychology) of mimesis , in which what we could call a principle of specialization reigns supreme and for which certain varieties of imitation can divert or weaken a capacity for just action. 2

Foreshadowing later castigations of actors and comedians for corrupting the ethos of citizens, Plato sees imitation as a dangerous source of inconstancy and diversity. Given the principle that an individual can only carry out a single occupation with excellence, an imitator should not imitate multiple kinds of action. This is why no one, according to Socrates, can be at one and the same time a good tragic and comic actor. If imitation is to be allowed, it is only to be directed at civically appropriate models, namely “people who are courageous, self-controlled, pious, and free, and their actions”; the maturing rulers of a just city “mustn’t be clever at doing or imitating slavish or shameful actions, lest from enjoying the imitation, they come to enjoy the reality.” 3 This striving after a stringent civic pedagogy, capable of blocking any fount of mutability or strife, is accompanied by the prescription of particular modes of imitation, narrative and music—down to the identification of proper rhythms and modes of music. So, just as tragedies are destabilizing, along with Homeric epics, by their depiction of amoral or metamorphic deities, so they are objectionable because of the centrality of mourning in their plots, which are antithetical to the education of courageous citizens and soldiers. As Socrates declares, “we no longer need dirges and lamentations among our words.” 4 In Book X, Socrates makes an incisive comparison between the different standards of value that his contemporaries apply, on the one hand, to lamentation over one’s own fate, which is to be curtailed and is viewed as a sign of unmanliness, and, on other, to the pleasure taken in the poetic imitation of the weeping and wailing of others. He notes that the risk of such a twofold criterion is that the absence of shame “in praising and pitying another man who, in spite of his claim to goodness, grieves excessively” leads to a potential loss of control over one’s own lamenting part. Mimesis is here potentially contagious and disruptive, and the pleasures of representation can always foreshadow a slackening of one’s capacity for just action: “enjoyment of other people’s sufferings is necessarily transferred to our own and . . . the pitying part, if it is nourished and strengthened on the sufferings of others, won’t be easily held in check when we ourselves suffer.” 5

The primacy of the ethical (and the political) over aesthetics or criticism in Plato’s account of tragedy is evident in how the intention to banish the tragedians from the city is accompanied by repeated acknowledgments of tragedy’s artistic excellence, in keeping with contemporary Athenian taste. In Book VII of the Laws , Plato also scripts an ironic provocation into the dialogue, namely that the tragedians cannot be let into the philosopher’s city because its legislators are in direct competition with them: “we are poets like yourselves, composing in the same genre, and your competitors as artists and actors in the finest drama, which true law alone has the natural powers to “produce” to perfection.” 6 It is precisely because tragedy, as another dialogue of Plato has it, “is that form of poetry which most delights the populace and most seduces the soul,” that a philosophically grounded political psychology, an alternative normative and pedagogic nexus of polis and psyche , must ultimately clash with it. 7 As Rancière has observed, the “arts” as such do not exist for Plato, only different ways of doing and making, together with a discriminating distinction between true arts that produce knowledge by imitating a model (an idea) and arts that imitate mere appearances. In choosing among the latter, the criterion is not epistemic (do they provide us with correct knowledge?) but pedagogical and ethical (do they contribute to shaping a good character?). In Plato’s ethical regime, therefore, “it is a matter of knowing in what ways images’ [and spectacles’ and texts’] mode of being affects the ethos , the mode of being of individuals and communities.” 8

The shift from this ethical regime to a “poetic” or “representative” one in the Poetics —by some lights the first treatise of literary theory, and one almost entirely devoted to tragedy in its surviving half—is underscored by Aristotle’s explicit distinction between criteria of correctness in the poetic and civic domains. 9 The privilege of tragic action to Aristotle’s poetics, as Rancière notes, shifts the issue from one having to do with the ethicopolitical adequacy of a copy to a model (and its associated communal pedagogy) to the pragmatic classification of different modalities of imitation and their effects. Or, in the French philosopher’s interpretation, from the “ essence of the image” to the “ substance of the poem, the fabrication of a plot arranging actions that represent the activities of men.” 10 This understanding of a shift in regimes chimes with the perception of the Poetics as a treatise in which the polis is palpably absent, a feature that some attribute to Aristotle’s effort to depart from the particularities of Attic tragedy in order to produce a universal theory of a poetic genre independent of its ritual or political context. 11

Whereas the origin of poetic genres in Plato is expeditiously dealt with, and entirely oriented toward political prescription, the Poetics advances a set of principles of rational classification among forms of mimesis , many of which continue to underwrite contemporary approaches to literary theory. Above all, genres of imitation can be distinguished in terms of their media , their objects , and their mode (or manner ). 12 What is imitated are not objects or things, but rather agents . In Aristotle’s enormously influential definition: “Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is admirable, complete and possesses magnitude; in language made pleasurable, each of its species separated in different parts; performed by actors, not through narration; effecting through pity and fear the purification of such emotion.” 13 The definition incorporates the six hierarchically ordered components of tragedy, which, as much of the Poetics detail, must be considered in judging the quality of a particular tragedy (demonstrating the continuity here between poetic analysis and the normative judgment of literary criticism). These components are “plot, character, diction, reasoning, spectacle and lyric poetry.” 14

Crucial to what could be seen as Aristotle’s intellectualistic bias for action, plot ( mythos ) has primacy over all other components and is characterized as the soul of tragedy. This primacy of plot, critical to Aristotle’s inauguration of a poetic or representative regime, also has its own “ethical” rationale. It is because “the goal of life is an activity, not a quality,” that tragedy concerns the mimesis of actions and not character, which is subordinate to the former. In tragedy, what characters do takes precedence over who they are , and character is “the kind of thing which discloses the nature of a choice.” 15 This predominance of plot is directly linked to key dimensions of Aristotle’s poetics of tragedy, namely what we could call, on the one hand, its textualism , on the other, its antimusical, antispectacular, and antiritualistic bias. In a manner which, as is explored later, jars with the deeply ritualized place of tragic performances in the agonistic and religious-political context of the Dionysia, for Aristotle the quality of a tragedy is “clear from reading,” and its central affective dimension is fundamentally carried by plot alone. 16 If the latter is properly constructed—as Aristotle’s model, the Oedipus Tyrannos , testifies—“even without seeing it, anyone who hears the events which occur shudders and feels pity at what happens.” Conversely, spectacle “is attractive, but is very inartistic and is least germane to the art of poetry.” 17 It is on this basis that Aristotle parries the view of tragedy as a plebeian genre inferior to epic, arguing that such considerations are merely a matter of performance, not poetry. 18

Though the classical or dramatic unities of time, place, and action are a retrospective projection onto the Poetics —ascribed to the Italian dramaturg Gian Giorgio Trissino, whose Sofonisba ( 1524 ) is taken to mark the beginning of early modern tragedy—a normative concern with unity and wholeness does govern Aristotle’s evaluation of tragedies. 19 This preoccupation with what we could term organic form is both spatial and temporal. For a play to be beautiful its parts must be arranged in the right order and within the proper magnitude. Neither instantaneity nor sprawl will do. Rather, and in keeping with the demands of the plot, a beautiful drama will imitate a great and unified action “up to the limits of simultaneous perspicuity.” 20 A synthetic overview of the tragedy and its plot is necessary. While grounding his poetics in a conception of organic form, Aristotle is deeply sensitive to the temporal unfolding of the action, which is marked by change of fortune ( metabasis, metabole ), preceded by the plot’s complication ( desis ) and followed by its resolution ( lusis ). 21 It is the metabasis or metabole , which in itself is the bearer of that key philosophical affect, “astonishment,” which arises “when things come about contrary to expectation but because of one another,” and with the retrospective seal of necessity. 22 The wonder at change sought in the production of tragic drama can occur through reversal ( peripeteia ), recognition ( anagnorisis ), or suffering ( pathos ). It is the presence of at least two of these qualitative elements of tragedy together that make a tragedy “complex.” Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannos is a model tragedy for Aristotle because of the way it masterfully combines peripeteia (e.g., the messenger triggers a doomed series of events in the very act of allaying Oedipus’s fears), anagnorisis (in the devastating passage from ignorance to knowledge), and pathos understood as an action (and not just a state of body or mind) involving destruction or pain—most memorably, Oedipus’s gouging out of his own eyes. The complexity of Oedipus Tyrannos can be compared to the simplicity of tragedies solely articulated around suffering (Sophocles’s Ajax ) and devoid of dramatic movement (Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound ). It is in the complex plots of tragedy that the superiority of poetry over history is also attested, in that—developing categories central to Aristotle’s own metaphysics—tragedies unfold actions according to their probability and necessity , rather than their mere factuality, thus attaining a superior universality. And yet tragedy is not to be prized for its philosophical lessons but rather for its specific affective operation, for the way in which, by eliciting pity ( phobos ) and fear ( eleos ) through its plots, it makes possible the catharsis of those emotions. Catharsis has been the subject of fierce and complex centuries-long debate, made all the more intense by the combination of its centrality to the definition of tragedy in the Poetics and its under-determination. Physiological purgation, religious purification, and psychoanalytic sublimation have all been advanced as ways of lending it theoretical solidity. 23 If the purpose of catharsis were viewed to be civic edification or conformity, we would of course be returned to Plato’s ethical terrain, though it is not by any means evident that this was a primary concern for Aristotle, who some commentators see as minimizing the collective or even democratic dimension of tragedy. 24

Dividing the City

If Plato suppressed tragedies in an ideal city, and Aristotle absented the city from his analysis of tragic poetry, how are we to approach the formative nexus of politics and tragedy in Ancient Athens? Many historians of Ancient Greece have underscored the role of tragedy as a form of collective self-reflection for a polity undergoing an epochal transition marked by the rise of democratic institutions of citizenship, a crisis of traditional belief systems, and recurrent violent conflicts—in the guise of both internecine stasis and “international” polemos . For Christian Meier, among the salient functions of tragedy was to represent the new through the old. 25 This meant both framing the unsettling transformations faced by Athenian citizens through familiar myths and legends and making room for ancient doubts as well as the more opaque or archaic aspects of social reality. The radical novelties of democratization, secularization, imperial power, and citizenship—innovations that could lead to fear about one’s own power—were thus filtered through the topoi of traditional myth or legend and presented on the collective and ritualized stage of the festivals, themselves organized as civic competitions ( agon ). This allowed tragedy to carry out a singular work of mediation and reflection on the “intellectual structure of politics,” with a nuance and complexity not available to formal civic discourse. Among its overriding concerns was the haunting of the polis by forms of limitless opposition and accumulation of power and wealth. In staging and giving form to these “unlimits,” tragedy could make manifest “the interdependence of progressive democracy and conservatism”; it could aid in “making visible the terrifyingly disruptive invisible powers of an interconnected universe,” while also showing how they could be integrated within the limits of a politically cohesive whole. 26

In other words, if tragedy is the art of Athenian democracy, it is so not in the mode of mere celebration or legitimation but in how it provides a collective and aesthetic form through which the polis can treat itself as a new and problematic subject—albeit through the anachronism of legendary struggles. The space of democracy can here be envisaged as one animated or haunted by conflict. This conflict not only operates between different citizens, or between citizens and their others (metics, barbarians, women, slaves), but between the city and its past. The world of tragedy is a world in transition, rent by ambiguity and beset by crisis. One of these transitions can be regarded as that between myth and logos—though the linearity of a passage from one to the other has been amply questioned. In Jean-Pierre Vernant’s view, tragedy emerges when myth comes to be interrogated from the standpoint of the citizen. Or, when the civic order enters into shearing tension with archaic or predemocratic standards of ethics and justice. Notwithstanding his criticisms of the philosophy of the tragic emerging from German Idealism and Romanticism, Vernant here echoes Hegel’s view of the Antigone as the exemplary representation of the clash between ethical orders with equal if incompatible claims to legitimacy. He also presents this as a clash between ethos (character) and daimon (religious power), or between agency and fate. Most significant in terms of the poetics of tragedy is the way in which its language registers contradictoriness. Attic tragedy stages the ethical equivocity of crucial words in the lexicon of the polis, above all nomos (law). As Vernant puts it in an incisive formulation: “the function of words used on stage is not so much to establish communication between the various characters as to indicate the blockages and barriers between them and the impermeability of their minds, to locate the points of conflict.” 27 This observation chimes with Friedrich Hölderlin’s encapsulation of tragic drama as “speech against speech,” or Alexandre Kojève’s observation, from his 1930s lecture courses on Hegel, according to which: “In Epic, it is necessary to know what happens; in Tragedy—what is said. In foreign wars (epic), no need to speak; in (tragic) civil war—discourse.” 28 The Spanish philosopher Maria Zambrano, writing in her Roman exile about Antigone , would refer to the play’s concern as “the labyrinth of civil war and subsequent tyranny . . . the double labyrinth of family and history.” 29

Tragedy, which is envisaged from this perspective not merely as a dramatic or literary genre but as a “total social fact,” explores an ethical (which is also to say a social, political, and religious) “border zone” in a “universe of conflict.” 30 Its worldview is not dogmatic but problematizing . As Vernant’s collaborator Pierre Vidal-Naquet suggests, tragedy proceeds with regard to the city like Freudian dreamwork in the face of reality, deforming, renewing, interrogating, and interrupting the civic continuity that Athens prized so highly. If tragedy is a mirror of the city, then it is a broken mirror, staging and refracting the polis ’s multiple tensions and the clashing codes of conduct that threaten its dissolution. This interrupting and questioning of the city is above all a questioning of the very possibility of action. If, following Aristotle, action is the object of mimesis , then, as Vernant suggests, that action is split between, on the one hand, the deliberative rational agency of protagonists, and, “on the other, placing one’s stake on what is unknown and incomprehensible, risking oneself on the terrain that remains impenetrable, entering into a game with supernatural forces, not knowing whether, as they join with one, they will bring success or doom.” 31 The apparent clarity of choice is persistently shadowed by an opaque necessity.

In her important contribution to the study of Attic tragedy, The Mourning Voice , Nicole Loraux pushes the approach of her erstwhile teachers Vernant and Vidal-Naquet even further to explore an unpolitical or impolitical tendency within tragedy itself. 32 Loraux questions a habit, especially evident in its 20th-century resurrections and repetitions (her example is Jean-Paul Sartre’s adaptation of Euripides’s The Trojan Women ) to over-value the political import and intention of Greek tragedy. 33 The theatre of Dionysus, as she quips, was not located in the agora, and tragedy is not just a reflection of the political but also or especially a way of taking on what the assembly of citizens pushes away. As her work on Greek political rhetoric and funeral orations had also explored, the self-image, legitimation, and reproduction of the polis is predicated on an effort to limit the divisive effects of practices not just of revenge and retribution, but of lamentation and mourning—practices that are, as Plato’s own objection to tragic mimesis remind us, associated with femininity. 34 Tragedy is the bearer of an antipolitical element to the extent that it challenges the Athenian ideology of the city , whereby the city must above all be united and peaceful. 35 This ideology, which turns the polis into an anti-tragic machine, requires a practice of forgetting against what Claudius in Hamlet calls “obstinate condolement.” The voicing of pain, especially women’s pain, interrupts the city’s orchestration of amnesia. If the city disavows death in the rhetorical invocation of its continuity, its “forever” ( aeí ), then tragedies force the city to face suffering in the interjection of female pain, emblematically expressed in the exclamation, recurrent throughout tragedies, aiaî . The voicing of pain also reminds us that tragedy is accompanied by a verbalized topography of the body, structured around the places of violent death. 36 What Athenian political discourse tries to hold apart, namely the spheres of civic speech and individual suffering, are mixed together in tragedy; this is reflected in its very dramatic structure, in the alternation of speeches, and in the alteration of speech. 37 This is why for Loraux, tragedy is a genre in conflict —not just in terms of its themes or contents, as Hegel, Vernant, and many others would agree—but in its very form . 38 To think with tragedy would then be to think it as a dramatic form of contradiction, making simultaneously present an insistent reference to politics with the staging of “anti-political behaviours,” a politics that prescribes forgetting with a mourning that revives divisive memory.

Were Greek Tragedies Tragic?

In our forgoing discussion, we have considered approaches, whether philosophical or historical, that treat tragedy as a more or less familiar genre of dramatic performance and an analyzable literary text. But what if there is something in Ancient tragedies that is ultimately refractory to treating them as “literature”? What if our approach to Aeschylus or Sophocles or Euripides is ultimately skewed by anachronism, by the projection of a philosophical concept of “the tragic” born in late 18th-century Germany onto 5th-century bce Athens? This argument—which resonates with but is not reducible to earlier arguments for the foreignness of tragic ritual to modern aesthetics—has been forcefully advanced in the past few years by a number of French authors. Drawing on an ethnopoetic approach, the classicist Florence Dupont has argued against the comprehensive neglect, beginning with Aristotle’s own Poetics , of the musical and ritual performance to which the tragic text is destined. 39 She makes this point with particular force in an iconoclastic study of the theatre of Aeschylus, widely hailed as the “father” of Attic tragedy. Rather than making our misrecognition of tragedy’s musical and dramatic singularity a matter of modern anachronism, for Dupont, the Aeschylus who we think we know, read, and perform, was born about a century after his death, with the canonization of the Greek tragedians. It was with the decree promulgated by the rhetorician and legislator Lycurgus—stipulating that the city produce monuments to Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, along with official versions of their dramatic texts, allowing for repeat performances as part of the city’s cultural patrimony—that the ground was laid for the great misunderstanding that still structures our relation to the genre. 40 Lycurgus’s decree, by “fixing the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides as paradigmatic and first texts . . . contributed to blocking the normal process of their diffusion and scattering towards other aesthetic forms, as well as their own mutation and osmosis with other musical genres.” 41 Before Lycurgus, the texts of the tragedies were neither to be read nor conserved. With him, we have a monumentalization and nationalization of Attic tragedy, which is also crucially a textualization—a political precondition for Aristotle’s own largely “apolitical” poetics. Tragedy is no longer a matter of agon , festival, acting, or music, as much as it is one of texts, of works. Its idealization is a de-dramatization.

Dupont reminds us that Aeschylus, along with other tragedians, was not a poet or writer in the modern sense. He was not an author but a director of sorts, a chorodidaskalos —someone who put on spectacles rather than produced texts. The few written plays we retain from Aeschylus are but mute, immobile archaeological traces of what living tragedies were. And even then, we now experience them without their extant musical notation, structured into acts and scenes that are externally imposed upon them. 42 In antiquity, writing was not a mode of expression but a technique at the service of practices; contra Aristotle, mise-en-scène had primacy over text. This is an archaeology that seeks to abandon our ideological search for origins and authors, a search elicited by Lycurgus’s “symbolic revolution” and his “identitarian patrimonalisation,” establishing a singularly Athenian birth of tragedy. 43 It also means abandoning the idea of an essence of tragedy. Notwithstanding her dismissal of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy as an “ontological narrative with no historical relevance,” Dupont’s anti-Aristotelianism shares with the German philosopher an emphasis on the centrality of festival, music, and suffering to Attic tragedies. 44

The music of tragedy is played by the aulos , the flute-like instrument that accompanies death laments, threnodies. Aeschylian tragedy is thus presented by Dupont “as the sonic spectacle of violence, murder and misery”; the competitions in which tragedies were performed were “festivals of tears” whose choruses were fictionally composed of cultural groups suited for mourning and weeping (women, the old, barbarians, captives). The redefinition of tragedy breaks with Aristotle’s Poetics as much as with philosophical conceptions of the tragic, whether in German Romanticism or Nietzsche: “Tragedy is a pathetic and aesthetic variation with its basis in the music of the aulos offered up to Dionysus.” 45 Though much more strongly articulated around the aural dimension, this perspective is comparable to the philological assault on philosophical definitions of tragedy advanced by Nietzsche’s great adversary, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who, in his 1907 “Introduction to Attic Tragedy,” first published in his 1889 edition of Euripides’s Hercules , declared that:

An Attic tragedy is a self-enclosed piece of heroic legend [ Heldensage ], poetically adapted in elevated style [ in erhabenem Stile ] for presentation by an Attic citizen chorus and two or three actors, and intended to be performed as part of public worship in the sanctuary of Dionysus.” 46

Crucially, however, for Dupont tragedy is fundamentally not a narrative, not even of a legend. The concatenation of events in the scenario that serves as the pretext for performance has neither necessity nor verisimilitude, drawing tragedy closer to oratorio than drama. Against an anachronistic backward projection of the structure of modern Western theatre on Attic tragedy, in Aeschylus there is “no plot, no psychology, no coherent character, no ideas, no representation”; without its musical mise-en-scène, the text is unreadable . Moreover, tragic speech is performative not representative . 47

Arguing against the hegemony of a philosophical conception of the tragic over our access to Greek tragedy, the French historian of literature William Marx—drawing partial inspiration from Wilamowitz’s 19th-century polemic against Nietzsche—has particularly stressed the distorting effects imposed by the history of the transmission and canonization of Greek tragedies. The thirty-two extant tragedies by the three playwrights monumentalized by Lycurgus are only a fraction of their contribution to the Dionysian contests (circa 220 plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides), and an even smaller one of a minimum number of 648 tragedies performed over all. 48 This brutal selection, partly accidental and partly political, taking place across Ancient Athens, Rome, Byzantium, and Renaissance Europe, is the unfortunate condition of possibility for modeling the generic object “ancient tragedy” on a very small sample of the plays performed at the Dionysian games. This tendency was already present after Lycurgus’s “symbolic revolution” in Aristotle’s Poetics , but became especially marked after the Romantic-Idealist birth of the tragic, which leads in its turn to a smattering even of the surviving tragedies becoming paradigmatic—namely Aeschylus’s Eumenides , and Sophocles’s Antigone and Oedipus Rex . Marx notes how the survival of Euripides’s “alphabetical” tragedies—named as such because of the organization of the volume in which they were compiled—allows us to see how a less loaded “sample” of tragic texts might make our extant models far less viable. To the filtering effects of Lycurgus, Aristotle, and the vagaries of transmission, Marx adds another striking element, namely the suggestion that our identification of tragedies with the question of fate or destiny is a by-product of how the selection of the tragic canon was consolidated in Rome in the 2nd century , in an ideological climate shaped by Stoic doctrines of fatum . Awareness of the historical contingencies attendant on the formation of our understanding of tragedy as a genre makes possible the conclusion that there “isn’t a tragic: there are almost as many as there are tragedies and just a few less than there are philosophies.” 49

Marx’s argument about the transformation of a partial and partisan sample of plays into tragedy as an “ideal literary object” over-determined by a philosophy of the tragic is a powerful one. So is his reminder that the rooting of tragedies in particular loci (e.g., Colonus) is something we cannot retrieve. For Marx, we risk acting like archaeologists who, faced with the Venus of Samothrace, would project back a world of headless, armless human beings. Yet this critique of the collusion of idealism and our modern notion of “literature” in eclipsing tragedy behind the tragic risks a kind of exoticism, a vision of tragedy as irremediably foreign and other, a lost practice that can only be reconstructed via negativa or by analogy with other domains of ritualized performance. As Marx concludes: “We must look for the truth of tragedy neither in the tragic nor in what the theatre is today—but elsewhere, sometimes very far away: in the Noh play, psychoanalysis, the mass.” 50

From the Ancients to the Moderns and Back Again

The effort to suspend the domination of a philosophy of the tragic over the reception of tragedies has also been advanced in the context of a re-evaluation of early modern dramaturgy and poetics. In a capacious recovery of the “lost” world of tragedy between the mid- 16th century and the close of the 18th, Blair Hoxby reminds us that in the vast span of time between the 7th and 15th centuries , tragedy largely vanished from the purview of European culture, with Euripides misrecognized as a philosopher and the very adjective “tragic” taking on an uncertain reference. 51 After Giorgio Valla’s translation of the Poetics in 1498 , the circulation in printed editions of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca from circa 1520s, and Francesco Robortello and Vincenzo Maggi’s lectures on Aristotle’s poetics, this situation changed drastically. But the poetics and literature arising from this renaissance of tragedy was not pedantically Aristotelian, nor did it anticipate the Romantic invention of the tragic. Early modern theorists of tragedy drew on an ample set of Ancient Greek and Roman sources, from Apuleius to Vitruvius, Horace to Plutarch. Their theories shaped and were in turn shaped by a tragic repertoire that cannot be boiled down to any univocal theory—including classical and baroque tragedies in Italy and France, the early operas of Monteverdi and Cavalli, Lully’s tragedies en musique , Jesuit solemn tragedies, and so forth. 52

Like challenges to our received notions of Attic tragedy, this revisionist perspective on the theory and practice of early modern tragedy takes an anti-idealist cast, putting the spectacle of suffering at the heart of the genre. In terms of the elements of tragedy enumerated in the Poetics , in early modern tragedy the construction of complex plots prescribed by Aristotle takes second stage to “pure displays of pathos [that] were in themselves the primary goal and justification of tragedy.” 53 Greek pathos came to be translated in Latin as affectus, perturbatio, passio , giving rise to a whole dramaturgical rhetoric of the passions. Scanning the variegated landscape of this forgotten repertoire, Hoxby proposes that we bracket our Romantic idea of the tragic and allow ourselves to be guided by five counterintuitive postulates, which systematically undermine the building blocks of that idea: great drama need not be national ; beautiful design need not be subordinated to organic form; tragedy is primarily a matter of theatre not poetry; we need to valorize the “modern” aspects of ancient tragedy, transcending the contempt for Euripides which marks the philosophies of the tragic; finally, the passions—and not just time, space or the emplotment of action—are the crucial dramatic unities of early modern tragedy. 54

It is striking how much Dupont’s or Marx’s objections to an understanding of tragedy articulated around the categories of freedom and necessity resonate with Hoxby’s conclusions. He encapsulates these in his reading of two tragedies that bookend the “lost world” of early modern tragedy, Trissino’s Sofonisba and Giambattista Varesco’s libretto for Mozart’s opera Idomeneo . As he notes:

Like a great deal of tragic drama written from 1515 to 1795 , Sofonisba offers its audience this pleasure: it dilates the brutal change from life to death into a rite of passage whose middle terms (dying and mourning) are ritualized, and in so doing it transforms the theatre into a house of mourning. 55

But this mourning is not the child of fatum ; both Trissino and Varesco are distinguished from later romantics by “their belief that tragedy is a meditation on the moral response to haphazardness in this world, not a demonstration of freedom that can succeed only if the hero is crushed by dire necessity.” 56

A reflection on early modern tragedy also requires a reconsideration of its politics. Departing in a more historical-sociological vein from Walter Benjamin’s pioneering reflections on the pathos of sovereign indecision in German baroque drama (the Trauerspiel , or mourning play), Franco Moretti interprets Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy as a radical problematization (analogous in force to the one identified by Vernant and Vidal-Naquet for Ancient Athens) of the legitimacy of political power. This conception of modern tragedy is both predicated upon the emergence of absolutism and oriented toward the “deconsecration” of sovereignty. For Moretti, this tragedy played a historically transformative role in giving rise to the kind of public that could envisage the possibility of bringing monarchs to justice. In his lapidary formulation: “Tragedy disentitled the absolute monarch to all ethical and rational legitimation. Having deconsecrated the king, tragedy made it possible to decapitate him.” 57 But the radicality of this tragedy can also issue into a kind of nihilism, as in the conclusion of King Lear , which “makes clear that no one is any longer capable of giving meaning to the tragic process; no speech is equal to it, and there precisely lies the tragedy.” 58

The agonistic dyad of tragedy and the tragic, which governs many critical theories of the genre, is directly thematized by Moretti, who tries to articulate a literary analysis of narrative structure with a historical and sociological excavation of normative orders. For him, tragedy must be grasped as “a structural concept, capable of simultaneously defining a syntagmatic axis (plot) and a paradigmatic axis (values), and of clarifying the unique relation that obtains between them in tragedy.” This involves a nominalist deflation of the metaphysics of the tragic, in which what comes to the fore instead is a genre determined by an impasse in the representation of history. There is no tragic, only tragedy, as “a particular form of representing that history: a rigorously asymmetrical structure marked by a constitutive lack. Fully realized tragedy is the parable of the degeneration of the sovereign inserted in a context that can no longer understand it .” 59 This conclusion resonates with the notion that Jacobean tragedy draws its formal coherence not from an aesthetics of harmony but from “the sharpness of definition given to metaphysical and social dislocation, not in an aesthetic, religious or didactic resolution of it.” 60 In other words, that this modern tragedy is a desperate effort to give form to the imminence of civil war, to the “idea of individuals and society being destroyed from within ,” 61 encapsulated in Albany’s lines from King Lear : “humanity must perforce prey on itself / Like monsters of the deep.” Or, as A. C. Bradley put it, in a distinctly Hegelian formulation: “the self division and intestinal warfare of the ethical substance, not so much the war of good with evil as the war of good with good.” 62

Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel had drawn critically from the writings of the jurist Carl Schmitt on sovereign exception to capture how baroque dramas exploded any notion of a trans-historical essence of the tragic. After World War II, and his own brief captivity and removal from academic positions for his National-Socialist militancy, Schmitt reopened his dialogue with Benjamin (“suicided” by Nazism at the onset of the war), precisely around the question of tragedy. Schmitt turned to Hamlet to identify modern tragedy as the form of a formless time, a period of civil war, revolution, and state-formation in which heroic drama lost its actuality. Rather than the historical-materialist method adopted by the likes of Moretti or Dollimore (or indeed Vernant and Vidal-Naquet with regard to Attic tragedy), Schmitt provides a political reading of Shakespeare pivoting around the notion of the “intrusion” of time and history into drama. As he notes:

In times of religious schisms the world and world history lose their secure forms, and a human problematic becomes visible out of which no purely aesthetic consideration could create the hero of a revenge drama. Historical reality is stronger than every aesthetic, stronger also than the most ingenious subject. 63

Whereas history had entered through the mediation of myth into Greek tragedy, in Shakespeare it does so as immediately available historical reality. 64 And yet, contra Moretti, for Schmitt grasping this intrusion still requires an idea of the tragic. As he writes: “Shakespeare’s greatness resides precisely in the fact that, in the existing chaos of his time and the quickly antiquated flotsam of daily events and reportage, he recognized and respected the tragic core.” 65 The tragic, here read through the lens of an antagonistic political realism, is a matter of the encounter with something intractable, irremediable. And therein is to be found tragedy’s “surplus value.” As Schmitt observes, it lies in the

objective reality of the tragic action, in the enigmatic concatenation and entanglement of indisputably real people in the unpredictable course of indisputably real events. . . . All participants are conscious of an ineluctable reality that no human mind has conceived—a reality externally given, imposed and unavoidable. This unalterable reality is the mute rock upon which the play founders, sending the foam of genuine tragedy rushing to the surface. 66

Births of the Tragic

It is a striking testament to the pervasiveness of the Romantic idea of the tragic that even such a sworn foe of “political romanticism” as Carl Schmitt could echo its central element, namely the encounter of human agency with adverse necessity. In his elegant and influential essay on the idea of the tragic, the German literary theorist Peter Szondi identified the 20-year-old F. W. J. Schelling’s interpretation of Oedipus Tyrannos , in his Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism ( 1795 ), as the ground zero of the tragic, understood in terms of the dramatic form given to “the conflict of human freedom with the power of the objective world,” and specifically by Oedipus’s willingness to undergo punishment for a crime he could not avoid. 67 This birth of the tragic must also be grasped in terms of the reciprocal determination of two problems, one political, the other philosophical. The first relates to the manner in which German Idealism and Romanticism are defined by a complex entanglement of enthusiasm and disappointment, emulation and phobia, vis-à-vis the transformative turmoil of the French Revolution, and especially the terror (and how could one, after 1793 , not read Aristotelian phobos in the shadow of the guillotine?). The second, which in its own way transcodes the political impasse of the relationship of German intellectuals without a state to the history-making violence of French liberation, has to do with the relation between a post-Kantian philosophy of autonomy (criticism) and a Spinozist understanding of necessity (dogmatism). 68 The specifically German idea of the tragic can be understood as a manner of thinking through, or repeating , the Ancient Greeks in an effort to give form to the shattering contradictions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries . The aesthetic form of the tragic then becomes inseparable from the philosophical form (or style) of the dialectic. And the dialectic can in turn be modeled by the resolution of the clash between the Furies and Orestes in The Eumenides (as it was in Hegel’s Natural Law essay of 1802 ), by the contest of ethical orders in the Antigone , or indeed by the moral and cognitive peripeteia dramatized in Oedipus Tyrannos , what Szondi regards as the “most tragic” (because most dialectical) of plays:

At every point in the hero’s fate, he is met with the unity of salvation and annihilation, a fundamental trait of everything tragic. It is not annihilation that is tragic, but the fact that salvation becomes annihilation; the tragic does not take place in the hero’s downfall, but rather in the fact that man meets his demise along the very path he took up to escape this demise. 69

One can adopt the broad outlines of Szondi’s analysis without necessarily regarding the young Schelling’s idiosyncratic reading of Oedipus’s crime of freedom as the incipit of the tragic. A number of scholars have seen in the writings of Friedrich Schiller of the early 1790s a more pertinent cornerstone, not least because of the manner in which Schiller’s poetics and aesthetics arose out of his own dramaturgical efforts. 70 Schiller’s multiple essays on the tragic are also instructive because, unlike Schelling, or indeed Hegel, they incorporate a sustained reflection on the question of the delight that may be drawn from the spectacle of tragedy. This notion of tragic pleasure allows us both to trace the mutations of catharsis and the genealogy of an idea of the sublime. Schiller’s work can also show how a reflection on the tragic articulated around the problems of writing and stagecraft can increasingly move toward a speculative idea of the tragic, itself dependent on the increasing separation of aesthetic freedom from the prospect of political emancipation. 71 It is also in Schiller’s work, perhaps better than in Schelling’s, that we can begin to grasp the way in which “the romantic philosophy of the tragic interacted with two other romantic projects: the creation of a new ideal of literary form and the formulation of a philosophy of history.” 72

A more expansive and detailed genealogy of the idea of the tragic may also serve to cultivate some skepticism regarding the suddenness of its birth. Among the preconditions for the emergence of the Idealist or Romantic conception of the tragic was a sensitivity to the difference between ancient and modern tragedy. In the late 17th century Querelle des modernes et des anciens , the difference could be the object of a largely static appraisal, in which ancient literary productions could be studied in “parallels,” much as Plutarch had once penned his Parallel Lives . It was in the context of the Querelle that André Dacier translated the Poetics into French, a feat repeated half a century later in Germany by Michael Conrad Curtius. Tellingly, the translation of the Poetics here preceded the translation of Greek plays, which in any instance existed not as scenarios to be acted but as literary monuments of sorts (it was only some while after the emergence of the tragic as an idea that the production of Greek tragedies became a staple of the European stage). As the 18th century wore on, the recognition of the difference between ancient and modern tragedies developed into a reflection on their historicity. The dis-analogies between modern and ancient drama could thus be envisaged in terms of the effort to attain a common idea (of the tragic). The emergence of bourgeois tragedies with Lessing and Diderot was predicated on the notion that repeating the tragic for the present might require jettisoning the Aristotelian frame. According to Billings, prior to the emergence of the Romantic idea of the tragic, it was in the long-neglected polemic of the French Hellenist Guillaume Dubois de Rochefort against the philosopher Charles Batteaux, and in the rejection of normative Aristotelianism in Herder’s writings on Shakespeare—produced in the context of the Sturm und Drang movement and Herder’s collaboration with Goethe—that a notion of the tragic intimately linked to the notions of historicity and historicization could be born. In this regard, the 1770s can be seen to represent as much of a periodizing rift as the 1790s. 73

A sensitivity to this temporal dislocation, as refracted in drama and poetics, is thematized in the most advanced products of the symbolic revolution that had its epicenter in Jena in the 1790s. For both Friedrich Hölderlin and G. W. F. Hegel, albeit in divergent ways, tragedy is not just a genre of conflict, it is a genre of transition —a privileged form through which to think historical temporality. 74 In Hegel, tragedy is “a representation of, and reflection on historical process . . . an inquiry into temporality itself . . . a figure for understanding historicity.” 75 For both thinkers what is at stake in tragedy—in the wake of the revolutionary rupture of 1789 and its aftermath—is the very possibility of collective ethical and political life. For Hegel, in whose work historicization is also a way of circumscribing the pertinence of the tragic to its Athenian site, tragedy allowed the Greeks to think the inadequacy of their forms of religion to their ethical life, while also revealing the one-sidedness and immediacy that beset the Greek polis , notwithstanding its dazzling achievements (by contrast with Aristotle, it is ethos not mythos which is paramount for the German philosopher). This circumscription of tragedy could allow Hegel to stress the deep discontinuity between Attic tragedy and its modern epigones, but also to assert the superiority of comedy as a genre capable of responding to the everyday life of modern spirit. For Hölderlin, instead, the formal lessons of Greek tragedy, namely what he presented as an interruptive dialectic of “caesura” and “transport,” provided a unique glimpse into how poetic form could accommodate time’s upheavals. For the German poet and playwright, the difference between the ancient and the contemporary was not a matter of sequence or progression, but demanded a kind of parallax view, in which the singularity of the Greeks could be brought into contact with the uniquely problematic character of the present. As Billings observes:

Greek tragedy for Hölderlin is the depiction of historical process itself, affording a glimpse into the way the individual exists in a changing world. Greek forms, then, ultimately teach what it is to be modern . . . the death of Greek tragedy is the birth of the tragic.” 76

The decline of classical tragedy could thus also be linked to the end of “periodic rhythm,” to the fact that in modernity, as Hölderlin had it, “beginning and end no longer let themselves be rhymed.” 77 Not the timelessness of (Greek) tragedy, but the particular and alien timeliness of its form, is what allows it to be such a resource for the present, but only as long as the transition it embodies is subjected to a practice of translation. This matter of translation in Hölderlin—whose reflections on tragedy accompanied his renderings of Oedipus Tyrannos and Antigone—is intimately linked to the manner in which he foregrounds, unlike his post-Kantian peers, how the language of tragedy, the “tragic word,” is drastically performative. In his striking formulation: “The Greek tragic word is deadly-factic, because the body which it seizes really kills.” 78 By the time that A. W. Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature consolidated the idea of the tragic into a consumable and influential set of precepts, Hölderlin’s eminently elusive notion of the “national” and his treatment of specific tragedies as ideational models of sorts would congeal into the kind of doxa that the likes of William Marx and Blair Hoxby have recently sought to dislodge. 79

Later reactions to Romantic and Hegelian legacies would put different stresses on the tragic cut between the ancient and the modern. For Kierkegaard, in a critical appropriation of the Hegelian apparatus, it was the implosion, under the sign of subjectivity, of the “substantial categories” of state, family, and destiny, and the complete separation from any epic tradition, that made for the difference of modern tragedy. The disanalogy between ancient and modern tragedy is rendered particularly acute by the fact that they stage radically dissimilar kinds of guilt, as well as by dissimilarities in the modes of compassion. For the Danish philosopher, in the Ancients there is greater sorrow but lesser pain, while modern tragedy—arising in an age with a tendency towards the comedy of everyday life—is a tragedy of anxiety , which “looks at sorrow in order to desire.” 80 In deep debt to this Kierkegaardian framing, the Hungarian philosopher and literary theorist Georg Lukács, before opting for dialectical realism in a Hegelian-Marxist vein, would sound one of the most striking notes of reflexive despair over the loss of the tragic—what we could conceive as a kind of “loss of loss.” In the essay on the “Metaphysics of Tragedy” from Soul and Form ( 1908/1911 ), the modern tragic is concerned not with the contradictions of action, but with its impasse or impossibility. The contemporary condition is marked not by the clash but by the abyss or incommunicability between being and value, ontology and morality, ethics and politics. For the young Lukács, historical existence “is the most unreal and unliving of all conceivable modes of being; one can describe it only negatively—by saying that something always comes to disturb the flow . . . Real life is always unreal, always impossible, in the midst of empirical life.” 81 Paradoxically, modernity is properly tragic to the extent it is refractory to tragic form , understood in clear contrast with the ancients. 82

Four decades earlier, as a university lecturer in philology at Basel, and prior to composing, under the dual influence of Wagner and Schopenhauer, his first book, The Birth of Tragedy , Friedrich Nietzsche would underscore the obstacles to the experience of Ancient tragedy—or rather to its imaginative as well as textual reconstruction—spawned by the Romantic idea of the tragic, establishing in the process the bases for a modern metaphysics of the tragic distinct from those of Schiller, Schelling, or Hegel. 83 As in Lukács, it was the form of tragedy, not its subject matter, that was key. Anticipating some of the themes encountered in Florence Dupont’s and William Marx’s iconoclastic critiques, Nietzsche’s lessons on Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannos would stress the “irreducibility of the tragic to the moral scheme guilt-punishment” and polemicize against the moralist-rationalist interpretation of tragedy as a display of immanent poetic justice, anticipating his later assault on Christianity and its juridical imagination. 84 For Nietzsche too, like critics of the tragic that followed him, it was pathos , or more precisely the “transfiguration of suffering,” which makes for the singularity of tragedy’s form, with catharsis here understood, in a musical vein, as “a necessary consonance in the world of dissonances.” 85 Perhaps more unique, also with regard to Nietzsche’s antidemocratic animus (some of which has been traced to the trauma of the Paris Commune), is the way in which his Basel courses do not just chastise the moralist-rationalist figure of tragedy, but repeatedly stress the collective, mass mysticism that lies at the heart of Greek tragedy. 86 Tragic action is subordinated to the lyrical and pathetic lament of the chorus. The widely disputed idea of an emergence of tragedy from the cult of Dionysus, in the dissolution of individuation within a cosmic order and the initiation to transcendence through extreme fright, is here bound to the fusional-democratic character of the Dionysian games, which Nietzsche calls “a great festival of freedom and equality in which the servile classes recovered their original right.” 87 Tragedy draws on “popular mass poetry” which the dithyramb masters. 88 As the young Nietzsche declared: “The dithyramb is a popular chant, even one principally issuing from the lower classes. Tragedy has always conserved a democratic character; just as it was born from the people.” 89 Modern tragedy is modeled after the law court and was never really able to recover its popular base, which is a precondition of the truly tragic. While ancient tragedy is a “dramatised hymn,” modern tragedy is a “dramatised novel.” 90

It is noteworthy that Nietzsche’s excavation of a tragedy beyond the moral-rationalist vision could serve as a resource for thinking the tragic outside of a Eurocentric ambit. For the Nigerian playwright and theorist Wole Soyinka, the nexus between ritual loss of individuation and an aesthetic of communal immersion is also paramount. Writing of the God Ogun in Yoruba tragedy, Soyinka describes how he “surrender[s] his individuation once again . . . to the fragmenting process; to be resorbed within universal Oneness, the Unconscious, the deep black whirlpool of mythopoietic forces.” 91 Tragic drama is incomprehensible without a cosmic orientation, without a “communal compact whose choric essence supplies the collective energy for the challenger of chthonic realms.” 92 Note how this Nietzschean inspiration is explicitly bound up in Soyinka with a rejection of historicism and an affirmation of an unabashedly metaphysical conception of the tragic, which shows

man’s recognition of certain areas of depth-experience which are not satisfactorily explained by general aesthetic theories; and, of all subjective unease that is aroused by man’s creative insights, that wrench within the human psyche which we vaguely define as ‘tragedy’ is the most insistent voice that bids us return to our own sources. There, illusively, hovers the key to the human paradox, to man’s experience of being and non-being, his dubiousness as essence and matter, intimations of transience and eternity, and the harrowing drives between uniqueness and Oneness. 93

The Italian philosopher Gianni Carchia, investigating the relations between Greek Orphic cults and the development of theories of tragedy, criticized the Nietzschean perspective on the tragic for dissolving its specific literary and artistic form too quickly into the de-individuating element of ritual. Echoing Hölderlin’s “caesura,” for Carchia tragedy is an aesthetic arresting of, and differentiating, from life. It is neither a progressive obliteration of myth nor its repetition. Rather,

the specific aesthetic physiognomy of tragedy can be grasped only in the oscillating space of its blocked agonistic dialectic, in the unresolved tension in which there face off myth and reality, visible and invisible, chthonic underground realities and Olympian surface, matriarchy and patriarchy. In philosophical-historical terms, tragedy thus seems to configure itself as the first autonomous work of art in the history of Western aesthetics precisely in the way it posits itself as a kind of ineffective, suspended ritual, idling, turning in the void. In between sacred rituality and fully secularised politics, it thus realizes in aesthetic-juridical terms the same exit from the alternative between myth and logos that orphism realised instead in aesthetic-religious terms. 94

The Form of Transition: Tragedies of Revolution and Decolonization

Declarations of the end or decline of tragedy have accompanied the genre ever since the 4th century bce , recurring in the early modern period as well, when, for instance, Thomas Rymer wrote A Short View of Tragedy: Its Original Excellence and Corruption ( 1693 ). 95 But, as we noted with reference to the young Lukács, the 20th century brought with it a particularly intense reflection on the supposed impossibility of tragic form under contemporary conditions. In the domain of literary theory, George Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy provided an eloquent if contestable case for the genre’s modern decline. For Steiner, tragedy is radically incompatible with Christian narratives of salvation or the rational hope borne by Marxism, neither of which can truly grasp the “irreparable.” As he declares: “Tragedy can occur only where reality has not been harnessed by reason and social consciousness.” 96 There is a certain irony in Steiner’s contention—belied by most historical studies of the context of democracy and dissensus in which Attic tragedy emerged—that the genre depends on a landscape of social stability, only emerging in situations where “the hierarchies of worldly power were stable and manifest.” 97 Like any theory that hitches the mutation in literary forms to a linear tale of secularization, Steiner’s is beset with methodological and historical problems, but the arc of tragedy’s demise could also be treated in a more persuasive vein—in terms of the difficulty of replicating the figure of tragic action in a modernity increasingly dominated by the deeply anti-tragic models of agencies promulgated by political economy. 98

Tragedy need not be an impossible or failing representation of the contemporary criteria for action for the genre to be in question. We’ve already noted Hegel’s valorization of comedy. But we could also recall the “deliberate unseating of the supremacy of tragedy and tragic inevitability” effected by Brecht as both dramaturg and theorist. 99 As Benjamin noted about his friend and collaborator’s momentous contribution to European drama:

in the secular drama of the West, too, the search for the untragic hero has never ceased. Often in conflict with its theoreticians, such drama has deviated time and again, always in new ways, from the authentic form of tragedy–that is, from Greek tragedy. This important but badly marked road (which may serve here as the image of a tradition) ran, in the Middle Ages, via Hroswitha and the Mysteries; in the age of the baroque, via Gryphius and Calderon. Later we find it in Lenz and Grabbe, and finally in Strindberg. Shakespearian scenes stand as monuments at its edge, and Goethe crossed it in the second part of Faust. It is a European road, but it is a German one too. If, that is, one can speak of a road rather than a stalking-path along which the legacy of medieval and baroque drama has crept down to us. This stalking-path, rough and overgrown though it may be, is visible again today in the plays of Brecht. 100

Tragedy, from this vantage point, could be repulsed for its ideological function. As Roland Barthes quipped: “Tragedy is only a way of assembling human misfortune, of subsuming it, and thus of justifying it by putting it into the form of a necessity, of a kind of wisdom, or of a purification.” 101

But where a radical political orientation could counsel abandoning the tragic, it can also lie behind the effort to recover and repeat it in a contemporary frame. If we can justifiably view tragic poetry as “synonymous with the organic crisis of a political and cultural order,” as “genre of transition,” then we are in a position to understand how the organic crises that birthed forth communist revolutions and decolonizing movements could serve as ferment for powerful re-imaginings of tragic theory and practice. 102 Raymond Williams’s incisive corrective to Steiner’s essay, Modern Tragedy , revisited 19th- and 20th-century dramaturgy on the basis of the conviction that:

Tragic experience, because of its central importance, commonly attracts the fundamental beliefs and tensions of a period, and tragic theory is interesting mainly in this sense, that through it the shape and set of a particular culture is often deeply realized . . . Tragedy is not a single and permanent kind of fact, but a series of experiences and conventions and institutions. 103

This supple and capacious approach to the question of tragedy was intended both to do justice to its literary history and to link this history to the “common sense” or “structures of feeling” that made tragedy a matter of everyday life, not just high theatre, or high theory. To capture the nature of that experience, as manifest in the structure of contemporary culture, was perforce to think the tragic dimension of contemporary revolutions too. Against those who would see an age of revolutions as an anti-tragic age, one whose belief in the possibility of progress makes it hostile to the irreparable, Williams argues that “the revolution is an inevitable working through of a deep and tragic disorder, to which we can respond in varying ways but which will in any case, in one way or another, work its way through our world, as a consequence of any of our actions. I see revolution, that is to say, in a tragic perspective.” 104 It is pertinent to note in this regard, that the concept of tragedy was part of the discourse of the Bolshevik Revolution, and that figures as diverse as Leon Trotsky and the novelist Andrei Platonov envisaged the possibility of a rebirth of tragedy in the context of a revolutionary socialist culture. 105

But if we can argue about a real rebirth and mutation of the tragic, understood both as a dramatic genre and, with Williams, as “a series of experiences and conventions and institutions,” it is in the long arc of decolonization more than in the furnace of socialist revolution that we may want to look for it. David Scott, in critical dialogue with C. L. R. James’s seminal history of the Haitian Revolution, has argued that it is to tragedy that we should turn if we want to shift from the “romance” of the anticolonial to a postcolonial predicament inimical to progressive heroics. 106 Scott’s recovery of a tragic perspective on decolonization, and especially of C. L. R. James’s contribution to it, is of great significance. It is James in fact who provides one of the most compact and incisive characterizations of tragedy as the contemporary “genre of transition.” For James, tragic form has an anticipatory quality, it registers the blockage of an idea of emancipation before a necessary mutation in objective possibility, in actuality: “Form is the conflict complete, the contradictions tearing away—but before the stage of actuality, of the revolution. It carries through the possibilities to the limit, but objective condition, purpose and activity have not yet all come together.” 107 For James, an avid reader of Aeschylus and Shakespeare alike (as was Marx before him), the struggles of the masses of Saint Domingue/Haiti against slavery and colonial capitalism brought together many of the elements of tragedy we’ve touched on hitherto: the relation between the individual leader and the masses as an analogue of the dialectic of hero and chorus; the historical peripeteia that temporarily turns a struggle for emancipation into its seeming opposite (namely with Toussaint Louverture’s partial reinstatement of the plantation regime); the inhibiting weight of the old on the chances of the new; and, perhaps above all, the notion of tragedy as the form through which to think and dramatize an organic crisis. 108

But the case of anticolonial and decolonial tragedy embodies a phenomenon that could be applied to the vast and discontinuous history of the genre, namely that much of its theory is elaborated through dramaturgical practice. The Haitian revolution and the figure of Toussaint were not just the object of an effort to emplot history “tragically” in The Black Jacobins , it was also the object of multiple efforts to stage it in tragedies. James himself wrote a play, Toussaint Louverture , which was produced starring the great African American actor and communist militant Paul Robeson. We can find James’s own dialectical thinking of the place of collective action as crucial to a modern tragedy of the revolution against racial slavery inscribed in his own stage directions: “they, the Negro slaves, are the most important character in the play. Toussaint did not make the revolt. It was the revolt that made Toussaint.” James’s whole political thinking could also be captured through his dramaturgical slogan: “bringing in the chorus.” In the second edition of The Black Jacobins , James saluted the great Martinican poet Aimé Césaire as “the architect of this [Caribbean] civilization, a commissioner of its blood, a guardian of its refusal to accept.” 109 Césaire himself wrote a compelling if relatively conventional biography of Toussaint but his response as a dramaturg to the Haitian revolution was truly innovative. In And the Dogs Were Silent , first produced as a “lyrical oratorio” in 1946 and in a “theatrical arrangement” as a “tragedy” in 1956 , Césaire radically revised tragic form, exploding the juxtaposition of protagonist and chorus into a poetic allegory in which the agon between characters (the “rebel-builder,” the “architect”) is inhabited by a multiplicity of pasts, and channels a plurality of voices. Not so much a Hölderlinian “speech against speech” or a clash between ethical orders, but an effort to translate in verse Césaire’s vision of the nexus between Black anti-colonial liberation and the legacies of Marxism and communism—the one which had led him, in his letter of resignation from the French Communist Party, to write about the need for a “a universal enriched by all that is particular, a universal enriched by every particular: the deepening and coexistence of all particulars.” 110

But a sustained theoretical reflection on the (im)possibility of postcolonial tragedy would have to wait for another Martinican writer, Édouard Glissant. Glissant also penned a tragedy of the Haitian revolution, Monsieur Toussaint , but it was in his critical and theoretical essays, namely L’intention poétique ( 1969 ) and Le discours antillais ( 1981 ) that he broached the issue of tragic form. In brief, we could argue that for Glissant it was the shape of Caribbean history, the ever-deferred transition out of a colonial condition, which made the idea and practice of tragedy as the form given to contradiction particularly challenging to attain, or simply unavailable. Glissant presents tragedy as an art that plays with the relation between unveiling and opacity, with what he poetically captures as the “re-solution of the dissolved,” the search for and resignification of a broken or menaced community. By contrast with the notion of tragedy as a matter of organic crisis, or the product of a hierarchically organized social stability, for Glissant the great moments of tragedy are not ones of crisis. Rather, tragedy requires a sense of social ferment and collective advance. Like Vernant, the tragic is here a matter of group self-reflection: “In the tragic act a community begins to meditate its own action. It is the sign of a shared possibility of action.” 111 Taking the “national” focus of the Romantic philosophy of the tragic into the context of decolonization and postcoloniality, Glissant notes that a people incapable of action does not yet know the tragic “crystallisation,” while conversely those who act already don’t need it. It is on this basis that he envisages the possibility of a new tragic cycle that would be driven by what he calls “denied fighting peoples,” a cycle that would no longer require “national unanimity” but move toward a “planetary” poetic.

In the essays collected in Le discours Antillais , this expansive anticolonial horizon mutates into a sui generis argument for the decline or undesirability of the tragic. 112 Glissant anatomizes the Martinican “Toussaint complex,” elicited by the island’s paralyzing absence of iconic heroes, the desubjectivating effects of the 1848 abolition of slavery by the French metropole, and the sequence of sterile revolts that pepper its history. A tragic hero for Martinique would need to be drawn from the unwritten history of the fugitives, of the maroons, but in the absence of this figure, as Glissant muses, others’ heroes cannot be our own, while our heroes are perforce the heroes of others (here referring explicitly to Frantz Fanon). But if tragic form is bound up with historical heroism as its content, and if it moreover hankers after totality (“the cosmo-metaphysical question of legitimacy”) in a collective adventure aimed at resolving multiple conflicts, what is to be done in a situation where History appears to be happening elsewhere? 113 As he comes to abandon the possibility of repeating tragedy in the Caribbean, Glissant turns, by way of contrast and flight, to a minor genre, that of the Caribbean tale. The structure, temporality and form of the tale undo the tragic imperative. In the tale there is no trajectory from the obscure to the clear, there is no dating or chronology, and time is not the fundamental dimension of the human. And, perhaps most importantly, given the enduring association of tragic agon with the juridical, there is neither the law, nor its writing. For Glissant then, the “Caribbean tale delimits a non-possessed landscape. It is anti-history.” 114 It allows the cross-pollination of multiple histories, what Glissant terms the infinite dissemination of Relation, without making concessions to the fascination of a sublime History, with its formative obsession with filiation, genealogy, and, one might add, guilt. In thinking Glissant’s flight from tragedy with and against C. L. R. James’s efforts to give tragic form to the struggles for decolonization—of the former’s injunction not to try and recommence the Greek miracle and the latter’s call to bring in the chorus—we can grow more sensitive to the enduring stakes of how we theorize a literary genre that continues to exceed, for good and ill, its restriction to particular histories, geographies, or even literary forms.

Discussion of the Literature

Cutting as it does across so many different disciplines—from classics to philosophy, history to comparative literature, theatre studies to ethnopoetics—and ranging across such a welter of textual and institutional objects, literature on tragedy defies synopsis. What’s more, and as some of the most illuminating recent studies have detailed, the categories of our literary and theoretical modernity are largely shaped by successive engagements with tragedy and crystallizations of “the tragic,” potentially leading to a mise en abyme of sorts. 115 Indeed, modern European philosophy and literary theory are largely unintelligible if we neglect how interpretations of tragedy and ideologies of the tragic determined their trajectory. As suggested throughout this article, it is nevertheless possible to broadly classify theoretical reflections on the genre in terms of whether their emphasis is primarily on the histories, forms, and performances of tragedies, or on more universal, or even trans-historical, ideas of the tragic or tragedy. Contemporary discussions are still indebted not just to the Romantic and Idealist genealogy of the tragic, but to the dialectical and historical-materialist theories that were in a sense an immanent critique of that tragic vision formed in and around Jena between the early 1790s and the end of the 19th century ’s first decade. The works of Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, but also Vincenzo Di Benedetto, Diego Lanza, and others for the Ancients, and Lucien Goldmann and Raymond Williams for the early modern period onward, remain largely unsurpassed in their totalizing grasp, though serious advances have been made, for instance, in the study of the relation between monetized exchange, sacrifice, and Ancient tragedy. 116 The vital if ambivalent nexus between tragedy and revolution as categories of modernity has also been the object of concerted treatment, while the hitherto largely neglected connections between tragedy, slavery (both ancient and modern), and revolutions against racial capitalism—intercut by the thematization of gender and sex difference—have also come to the fore as critical foci of research. 117 While the death or decline of tragedy may still be a widespread conviction, albeit one that has been compellingly countered, there are few signs that the theory of tragedy is nearing expiry. 118

Further Reading

• Beistegui, Miguel de , and Simon Sparks , eds. Philosophy and Tragedy . London: Routledge, 2000.
• Benjamin, Walter . Origin of the German Trauerspiel . Translated by Howard Eiland . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019.
• Billings, Joshua , and Miriam Leonard , eds. Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Blanchot, Maurice . The Infinite Conversation . Translated by Susan Hanson . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
• Butler, Judith . Antigone’s Claim . New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
• Cave, Terence . Recognitions: A Study in Poetics . Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1988.
• Cavell, Stanley . Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare . Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
• Clark, T. J. “Picasso and Tragedy.” In Pity and Terror: Picasso’s Path to Guernica , edited by T. J. Clark and Anne M. Wagner . Madrid: Museo Reina Sofia, 2017.
• Deleuze, Gilles . Nietzsche and Philosophy . Translated by Hugh Tomlinson . New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
• Eagleton, Terry . Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic . Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002.
• Glick, Jeremy Matthew . The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution . New York: New York University Press, 2016.
• Goldmann, Lucien . The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine . London: Verso, 2016.
• Höfele, Andreas . No Hamlets: German Shakespeare from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Honig, Bonnie . Antigone, Interrupted . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
• Hoxby, Blair . What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Leonard, Miriam . Tragic Modernities . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
• Menke, Christoph . Tragic Play: Irony and Theater from Sophocles to Beckett . Translated by James Phillips . New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
• Porter, James I. The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on The Birth of Tragedy . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.
• Scott, David . Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
• Seaford, Richard . Tragedy, Ritual and Money in Ancient Greece: Selected Essays . Edited by Richard Bostock . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• Winkler, John J. , and Froma I. Zeitlin . Nothing to Do with Dionysus? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

1. Plato, Republic III, in Complete Works , trans. G. M. A. Grube; rev. C.D.C. Reeve, and ed. John M. Cooper with D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), 394c, 1032.

2. Enzo Melandri, I generi letterari e la loro origine [Literary genres and their origin], pref. Giorgio Agamben (1980; repr. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2014).

3. Republic III, 395c, 1033.

4. Republic III, 398d, 1035.

5. Republic X, 606b, 1210.

6. Plato, Laws VII, trans. Trevor J. Saunders (London: Penguin, 1970), 817c, 1484. See also Republic VIII, 568a, 1178.

7. Plato, Minos , trans. Malcolm Schofield), in Complete Works , 321a, 1317.

8. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics , trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 21. On the difference between Plato and Aristotle as concerns the notion of the tragic, and their afterlives, see also Evina Sistakou, Tragic Failures: Alexandrian Responses to Tragedy and the Tragic (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016), 1–9.

9. Aristotle, Poetics , ed. and trans. Malcolm Heath (London: Penguin, 1996), 42.

10. Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics , 21.

11. See Edith Hall, “Is There a Polis in Aristotle’s Poetics ?” in M. S. Silk, ed., Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 295–309; and the helpful discussion of the debate generated by Hall’s thesis in Johanna Hanink, Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 215–220. Hanink is especially interesting on the ways in which, by the time of Aristotle, tragedy had become a pan-Hellenic rather than restrictedly Athenian phenomenon. She also helpfully reminds us that elsewhere in his vast corpus, Aristotle dealt with the history of Athenian tragic performance as well as with the biographies of tragedians. Among lost works attested to in commentaries are a Victories at the Dionysia , an On Tragedies , a Didascaliae (an annotated list of victors and competitors at tragic competitions), as well as On Poets . Malcolm Heath, “Should There Have Been a Polis in the Poetics?” Classical Quarterly 59 (2009): 468–485.

12. Aristotle, Poetics , 3.

13. Aristotle, Poetics , 10.

14. Aristotle, Poetics , 11.

15. Aristotle, Poetics , 12.

16. Aristotle, Poetics , 47.

17. Aristotle, 13. On the centrality of dramaturgy to any understanding of Greek tragedy, see Karl Reinhardt’s classic treatment: Aischylos als Regisseur und Theologe (Bern: Francke, 1949). For a less theologically-oriented and more philological reconstruction of tragedies as visual performances, see Vincenzo Di Benedetto and Enrico Medda, La tragedia sulla scena. La tragedia greca in quanto spettacolo teatrale [Tragedy on the stage: Greek tragedy as a theatrical spectacle] (Turin: Einaudi, 1997).

18. Aristotle, Poetics , 47.

19. Edwin Simpson-Baikie, The Dramatic Unities (London: Trübner, 1878).

20. Aristotle, Poetics , 14.

21. Later theoreticians of tragedy will associate this change of fortune to the notion of catastrophe . While the latter is present in Aristotle’s work, it is not a component of his own poetics.

22. Aristotle, Poetics , 17.

23. See Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics . 2nd rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Jacob Bernays, “On Catharsis: From Fundamentals of Aristotle’s Lost Essay on the ‘Effect of Tragedy’ (1857)”, Peter L. Rudnytsky, American Imago 61, no. 3 (2004): 319–341; Simon Critchley, Tragedy, the Greeks and Us (London: Profile, 2019), 187–195; and Peter Thomas, “Catharsis (Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism),” Historical Materialism 17 (2009): 259–264.

24. Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed , trans. Charles A. McBrie, Maria-Odilia Leal McBride, and Emily Fryer (1974; repr. London: Pluto, 2008), 28; and Page duBois, “The Death of Character,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 21, no. 3 (2014): 301–308.

25. Christian Meier, The Political Art of Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1993). For a Marxist perspective on tragedy as the foremost artistic reflection of the Athenian transition to democracy, see George Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens: A Study in the Social Origins of Drama (1941; repr. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1980).

26. Richard Seaford, “Introduction,” in Aeschylus, The Oresteia , trans. George Thomson (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2004), xxvi–xxvii.

27. Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy,” in Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece , trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 42. For a critique of this perspective from within a Marxist framework, see Vincenzo Di Benedetto and Alessandro Lami, Filologia e marxismo. Contro le mistificazioni [Philology and Marxism: Against mystifications] (Napoli: Liguori, 1981).

28. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel , ed. Raymond Queneau (1947; repr. Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 296.

29. Maria Zambrano, La tumba de Antígona [Antigone’s grave], ed. Virginia Trueba Mira (Madrid: Cátedra, 2015), 151.

30. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Le miroir brisé: Tragédie athénienne et politique [The broken mirror: Athenian tragedy and politics] (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2002), 9.

31. Vernant, “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy,” 45.

32. I use this term, which originated in Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man , in a theoretical acceptation broadly drawn from contemporary Italian political theories attuned to the problem of tragedy. See Roberto Esposito, Categories of the Impolitical , trans. Connal Parsley (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015); Massimo Cacciari, The Unpolitical: On the Radical Critique of Political Reason , ed. Alessandro Carrera, trans. Massimo Verdicchio (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).

33. See also Miriam Leonard, Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-War French Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

34. See Nicole Loraux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens , trans. Corinne Pacht with Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2006); and Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Zone Books, 2007).

35. Loraux draws the notion of an ideology of the city from Diego Lanza and Mario Vegetti, ‘L’ideologia della città’, in Diego Lanza et al., L’ideologia della città (Napoli: Liguori, 1977).

36. Nicole Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman , trans. Anthony Forster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 49. On the question of the body in tragedy, see also William Marx, Le tombeau d’Oedipe: Pour une tragédie sans tragique [The tomb of Oedipus: For a tragedy without the tragic] (Paris: Minuit, 2012).

37. This mixing should not be regarded as a neat transgression or revolution, especially in the domain of sexual difference. As Loraux notes: “whatever freedom the tragic discourse of the Greeks offered to women it did not allow them ultimately to transgress the frontier that divided and opposed the sexes. Tragedy certainly does transgress and mix things up—this is its rule, its nature—but never to the point of irrevocably overturning the civic order of values.” Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman , 60.

38. Nicole Loraux, The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy , trans. Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 81.

39. Florence Dupont, The Invention of Literature: From Greek Intoxication to the Latin Book , trans. Janet Lloyd (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); L’insignifiance tragique [Tragic insignificance] (Paris: Gallimard/Le promeneur, 2001); and Aristote ou le vampire du théâtre occidental [Aristotle, or the vampire of Western theatre] (Paris: Aubier, 2007).

40. On Lycurgus’s decree, see also Hanink, Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy , and Jean Bollack, “An Act of Cultural Restoration: The Status Accorded to the Classical Tragedians by the Decree of Lycurgus,” in The Art of Reading: From Homer to Celan , trans. Catherine Porter and Susan Tarrow, with Bruce King, ed. Christoph Koenig, Leonard Muellner, Gregory Nagy, and Sheldon Pollock (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2016).

41. Florence Dupont, Eschyle (Lausanne: Ides et Calendes, 2015), 29.

42. Dupont, Eschyle , 44.

43. Dupont, Eschyle , 44.

44. Dupont, Eschyle , 28.

45. Dupont, Eschyle , 44.

46. Quoted in Joshua Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 230.

47. Dupont, Eschyle , 60, 69.

48. For an intense and idiosyncratic reflection on the loss of tragic texts, see the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadaré’s essay on Aeschylus, Eschyle ou le grand perdant [Aeschylus, or the great loser], trans. Jusuf Vrioni and Alexandre Zotos (1988; repr. Paris: Fayard, 1995).

49. Marx, Le tombeau d’Oedipe , 87.

50. Marx, 159. The mention of psychoanalysis is somewhat awkward here, given how much the symbolic revolution that gave birth to “the tragic” in the 1790s is a condition of possibility for the Freudian appropriation of the myth of Oedipus. The literature on psychoanalysis, tragedy, and Oedipus is vast, but see especially Jean Bollack, “Le fils de l’homme: Le mythe Freudien d’Oedipe,” [The son of man: The Freudian myth of Oedipus] in La naissance d’Oedipe: Traduction et commentaires d’Oedipe roi [The birth of Oedipus: Translation and commentaries on Oedipus Rex] (Paris: Gallimard, 1995); and Suzanne Gearhart, The Interrupted Dialectic: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and their Tragic Other (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

51. Blair Hoxby, “What Was Tragedy? The World We Have Lost, 1550–1795,” Comparative Literature 64, no. 1 (2012): 1–32. On the theory of tragedy among sixteenth century Italian humanists, including Lodovico Castelvetro and Piero Vettori, see also the Italian Marxist philosopher Galvano Della Volpe’s Poetica del Cinquecento [Poetics of the Sixteenth Century] (Bari: Laterza, 1954).

52. On the part played by the effort to create an aesthetic and civic form to match Ancient tragedy in the genesis of opera, see Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, A History of Opera (London: Penguin, 2015), 43. The Attic reference was crucial to the genesis and theory of Wagnerian opera. See Sandra Mansutti, “Wagner e la tragedia greca,” [Wagner and Greek tragedy] in Metamorfosi del tragico fra classico e moderno [Metamorphoses of the tragic between the classic and the modern], ed. Umberto Curi (Rome: Laterza, 1991).

53. Hoxby, “What Was Tragedy?” 5.

54. Hoxby, “What Was Tragedy?” 15–22.

55. Hoxby, “What Was Tragedy?” 26.

56. Hoxby, “What Was Tragedy?” 28.

57. Franco Moretti, “The Great Eclipse: Tragic Form as the Deconsecration of Sovereignty,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms , trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs and David Miller, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1988), 42. See also Moretti’s more recent effort to bring the digital humanities to bear on the (Hegelian) theory of tragedy: “‘Operationalizing’: Or, the Function of Measurement in Literary Theory,” New Left Review 84 (2013), 116–119.

58. Moretti, “Great Eclipse,” 53. Early modern discussions of Ancient Greek tragedy and its poetics faced some embarrassment when having to confront its connections to democracy. See Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic , 28.

59. Moretti, “Great Eclipse,” 55.

60. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Brighton, UK: Harvester Press, 1984), 39. See also Victor Kiernan, Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare (London: Verso, 1996).

61. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy , 21.

62. A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909), cited in Dollimore, Radical Tragedy , 54.

63. Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of Time into the Play , trans. David Pan and Jennifer Rust (Candor, NY: Telos Press, 2009), 30.

64. This can be contrasted with Vidal-Naquet’s observation that political history does indeed “intrude” directly into Attic tragedy too, for instance in the way that Ephialtes’s political reform of 462 bce was the direct referent for Aeschylus’s Oresteia . See Vidal-Naquet, Le miroir brisé . As Billings notes vis-à-vis the post-1790s reception of Attic tragedy, “The belief that Greek tragedy was fundamentally about political events transformed the early modern trope of history-as-tragedy into the modern notion of tragedy as a meaningful representation of historical process.” Genealogy of the Tragic , 11.

65. Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba , 51.

66. Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba , 45.

67. Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic , trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 7. Contrast this sublime figure of moral criminality with Ernst Bloch’s irreverent presentation of Oedipus Tyrannos as a forerunner of the detective novel. Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays , trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 256–257.

68. See also Hoxby, “What Was Tragedy?” 8–11.

69. Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic , 59. See Alberto Toscano, “Taming the Furies: Badiou and Hegel on The Eumenides,” in Badiou and Hegel: Infinity, Dialectics, Subjectivity , ed. Antonio Calcagno and Jim Vernon (Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington Books, 2015).

70. Bernhard Zimmerman, Europa und die grieschische Tragödie: Vom kultischen Spiel zum Theater der Gegenwart [Europe and Greek tragedy: From cultic play to the theatre of the present] (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2000), ch. 8; Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic , 113–122.

71. Vassilis Lambropoulos, The Tragic Idea (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 30–36.

72. Hoxby, “What Was Tragedy?” 10.

73. Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic , 45–71.

74. Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic , 167, 193. On Hölderlin’s poetics of tragedy, and the way in which it cuts into and across the emergence from the tragic of a speculative dialectic, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The Caesura of the Speculative,” in Typographies: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics , ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

75. Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic , 162, 164.

76. Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic , 221.

77. Jean-François Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 2.

78. Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters , ed. and trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (London: Penguin, 2009), 330; and Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic , 207.

79. Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic , 225; and Hölderlin, Essays and Letters , 330.

80. Søren Kierkegaard, “Ancient Tragedy’s Reflection in the Modern,” in Either/Or: A Fragment of Life , ed. Victor Eremita and trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1992), 153.

81. Georg Lukács, “The Metaphysics of Tragedy,” in Soul and Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 176.

82. For the place of tragedy between the epic and philosophy in the young Lukács, see Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature , trans. A. Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 29. For Lukács’s views on the possibility of modern tragedy as a dramatic form, see his précis of his Hungarian study on the subject from 1909: “The Sociology of Modern Drama,” trans. Lee Baxandall, Tulane Drama Review 9, no. 4 (1965): 146–170.

83. On Nietzsche’s thinking of the tragic beyond his early writings, see Nuno Nabais, Nietzsche and the Metaphysics of the Tragic , trans. Martin Earl (London: Continuum, 2006). In the early 1960s, the Nietzschean conception of the tragic was revived in an antidialectical vein by Michel Foucault, in his History of Madness (1961) and Gilles Deleuze in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962). See the astute comments in Warrant Montag, “ Foucault and the Problematic of Origins: Althusser’s Reading of Folie et déraison , ” Borderlands 4, no. 2 (2005). See also Andrew Cutrofello, “Foucault on Tragedy,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 31, nos. 5–6 (2005): 573–584.

84. Friedrich Nietzsche, Introduction aux leçons sur l’Oedipe-Roi de Sophocle/Introduction aux études de philologie classique [Introduction to the lectures on Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex / Introduction to the study of classical philology], trans. Françoise Dastur and Michel Haar, ed. Michel Haar (Fougères: Encre Marine, 1994), 15.

85. Nietzsche, Introduction aux leçons , 71.

86. Peter Thomas, “Over-Man and the Commune,” New Left Review 31 (2005), 139.

87. Nietzsche, Introduction aux leçons , 37.

88. Nietzsche, Introduction aux leçons , 40.

89. Nietzsche, Introduction aux leçons , 43.

90. Nietzsche, 47. Contrast with Giorgio Agamben’s recent suggestion of tragedy’s origination in the satyr play. Reminding us of the fact that the latter capped the performance of tragic trilogies at the Dionysian festivals, Agamben states that “satyrs are more ancient than the heroes of tragedy, and in replacing—or pairing—human protagonists with satyrs, satyric drama [ saturikon drama ] reconnects itself with the non-human origin of all theatre.” Giorgio Agamben, Pulcinella, or, Entertainment for Kids in Four Scenes , trans. Kevin Attell (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2018), 38.

91. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (1976; repr. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 153.

92. Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World , 37.

93. Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World , 140.

94. Gianni Carchia, Orfismo e tragedia. Il mito trasfigurato [Orphism and tragedy: Myth transfigured] (1979; repr. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2019), 55–56. On the juridical dimension of tragedy, it is interesting to recall Walter Benjamin’s observation, in his Trauerspiel book, that the unity of place, time and action closely matches the unity of the tribunal, the court day, and the trial. Benjamin was here in dialogue with his friend Florens Christian Rang’s observations on theatre and agon . Carchia’s criticism of Nietzsche is also modeled largely after Benjamin.

95. Richard Halpern, Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 1.

96. George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber and Faber, 1961)

97. Steiner, The Death of Tragedy , 194.

98. Halpern, Eclipse of Action .

99. Stanley Mitchell, “Introduction,” in Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht , ed. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1998), xii.

100. Benjamin, Understanding Brecht , 17–18.

101. Cited as an epigram to Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Nature, Humanism and Tragedy,” New Left Review 31 (1965), which unpacks the consequences of Barthes’s Brechtian position, by way of a critical engagement with the “tragified universe” of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea .

102. Moretti, “The Great Eclipse,” 71.

103. Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy , ed. Pamela McCallum (1966; repr. Toronto: Broadview Encore, 2006), 69.

104. Williams, Modern Tragedy , 100.

105. Lars T. Lih, “‘Our Position Is in the Highest Degree Tragic’: Bolshevik ‘Euphoria’ in 1920,” in Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys, eds., History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism (London: Verso, 2007); Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution , ed. William Keach, trans. Rose Strunsky (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005); Andrei Platonov, “On the First Socialist Tragedy,” New Left Review 69 (2011): 30–32. For a discussion of these questions see Toscano, “ The Broken Music of the Revolution: Trotsky and Blok ,” Crisis and Critique 4, no. 2 (2017): 404–426.

106. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2004). For further discussion of Scott’s interpretation of the “tragic” James, as well as for how it relates to the broader debate on the politics of tragedy, see Toscano, “Politics in a Tragic Key,” Radical Philosophy 180 (2013): 25–34.

107. C. L. R. James, “Rough Notes from Discussion for Melville Book,” 3. Quoted in Aaron Love, The Caribbean Novel and the Realization of History in the Era of Decolonization , PhD diss., New York University, May 2011.

108. As James wrote in his great historical narrative, “it is the tragedy of mass movements that they need and can only too rarely find adequate leadership.” C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution , 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1989), 25.

109. James, Black Jacobins , 400.

110. Aimé Césaire, “Letter to Maurice Thorez,” trans. Chike Jeffers, Social Text 103, vol. 28, no. 2 (2010 [1956]), 152.

111. Édouard Glissant, L’intention poétique (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 197.

112. In English, see the partial translation in Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays , trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989).

113. Édouard Glissant, Discours antillais (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 247.

114. Glissant, Discours antillais , 263.

115. Joshua Billings and Miriam Leonard, eds., Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) ; Blair Hoxby, What Was Tragedy? Theory and the Early Modern Canon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) ; Szondi, Essay on the Tragic ; Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic ; R. Jahan Ramazani, “Heidegger and the Theory of Tragedy,” The Centennial Review 32, no. 2 (1988): 103-129; and Jacques Taminiaux, Le théâtre des philosophes: La tragédie, l’être, l’action [The theatre of the philosophers: Tragedy, being, action] (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1995).

116. Richard Seaford, Tragedy, Ritual and Money in Ancient Greece: Selected Essays , ed. Richard Bostock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) .

117. See Miriam Leonard, Tragic Modernities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) ; Tina Chanter, Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011); Jeremy Matthew Glick, The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 2016) ; and David Scott, Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014) .

118. Christoph Menke, Tragic Play: Irony and Theater from Sophocles to Beckett , trans. James Phillips (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) .

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Articles & Advice > College Admission > Blog

How to Approach Tragedy and Loss in Your College Essay

You may feel compelled to write about a difficult subject for your college essay. Here are some tips to write about hard topics with respect and impact.

by Keaghan Turner, PhD Partner, Turner+Turner College Consulting

Last Updated: Mar 16, 2023

Originally Posted: Aug 5, 2019

Tragedy and loss are not easy subjects to broach in writing at all, let alone very public writing that someone else will read or hear spoken. Writing about tragedy and loss certainly won’t be for everyone, so make sure you give it some real thought before you try to dive in and put your jumbled, high-emotion thoughts to page. But if a difficult topic is the one that compels you to write a great admission essay, then it can be done—as long as it’s done the right way. Before we explore the key elements to writing about traumatic experiences the right way, here’s some perspective through a personal story of loss.

The struggles with writing about loss

One spring, there was a rash of suicide attempts at a local high school in my community. Two of them were successful; others were not. The first time I wrote about this loss was for a memorial service. This is the second time. It’ll never be “easy” to write about, just as what happened will never make sense to anyone who knew the victims. How can we use words for trauma and grief in order to make sense of what doesn’t make sense?

One student, in a mature spirit of activism, wrote an open letter to the school district office, which was posted and reposted all over social media until there was a school assembly featuring officials, professionals, and faith leaders open to the whole community. The Parent Teacher Organization gave out green ribbons to raise awareness about depression and other mental illnesses . Most immediately for the teens in my town, the words appeared via social media posts. That was how the students wrote about their loss in the weeks following the first (then six weeks later, the second) tragedy. Some students will write about it for their college essays, and they’ll need help. It’ll be important to them to do a good job, to honor the memories of their friends who passed away, to get it “right.”

To say the least, people had mixed feelings about these posts and reposts; about what should be discussed and how; and how to protect the grieving families from more suffering. It’s a small community, and these were shockingly sad events. The fact is, these tragedies have already fundamentally redefined the high school experience of the students in my town. The ripples might be subtle or pronounced, but they exist. Peers will mark time using these losses (midterms happened  before , prom happened  after ), and the experience will not be forgotten; it’s now part of their life stories.

Related:  Mental Health: What Is It and How You Can Find Help

How to tackle writing about tragedy the right way

Difficult topics can ( and should) be broached in admission essays because they are a part of life that can’t be ignored and often play a huge part in defining who we are as people. What I told those students about handling loss with their words is summed up below, and it also applies to writers tackling any kind of special need, medical condition, or family struggle in their college essay.

Be honest and straightforward

You don’t need to have been super close to a tragedy to be affected by it or to write about it effectively. But don’t pretend you were affected in a way you weren’t; you’ll come across as phony. If you’re moved to write about a painful event, there’s a genuine reason behind that impulse. That reason is good enough; figure out what it is. That being said, powerful life events require quick-hitting, direct sentences. Be like Hemingway, my professors used to say—keep your sentences short; they have more punch that way. You don’t need lots of flowery or figurative language to convey that your subject is a big deal—but at the same time, do make sure you’re showing, not telling, in your writing . Connecting emotionally is about expressing that time through actions and events, not just thoughts and feelings.

Find your message with the right words

Superfluous language gets in the way of gravity. Be ready to prune drafts until you feel you’ve found the right semantic fit for the intention behind your words. Your essay also needs a theme, a call, a purpose. The point isn’t simply to narrate a sad story in order to show the reader how sad it is (e.g., your essay’s message is not that teen suicide is tragic); rather, the point is to connect the sad story to the essay prompt you've chosen to address. The event itself essentially takes a backseat to the points you want to make about what it  means .

Be respectful

This is really the one ultimate rule, and if you do this, the other stuff can be worked out. In the context of the college essay, respect usually involves approaching your subject matter somewhat anonymously. Names aren’t necessary. If you’re engaging a serious, painful topic—and it involves others—be careful to write as circumspectly and thoughtfully as you can. When in doubt, ask someone whose judgment you trust (like a teacher or parent) to check it out for you.

Seek help for you or others

Is it easy to write about hard realities? Not at all—not in any context, not for anyone. But if you’re brave enough to try, you may find it to be transformative and therapeutic to articulate your experience as you process your grief and begin to heal. And the most important thing to remember is to take those emotions and experiences and use them to help others in the future before other tragedies strike. Writing about these situations can often shed light and inspire others to help people in need, which in the end is more crucial than anything else. If you have been affected by tragedy or are worried about a friend who is struggling, help is available. Contact the  National Suicide Prevention Lifeline  800-273-8255 or a trusted adult.

For more advice on college essays, check out our Application Essay Clinic , or if you’re in need of mental health advice, check out the tag “mental health.”

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About Keaghan Turner, PhD

Keaghan Turner, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Digital Writing and Humanistic Studies at Coastal Carolina University . She has taught writing and literature at small liberal arts colleges and state flagship universities for the past 20 years. As a managing partner of Turner+Turner College Consulting, LLC, Dr. Turner also counsels high school students on all aspects of their college admission portfolios, leads writing workshops, and generally tries to encourage students to believe in the power of their own writing voices. You can contact Dr. Turner on Instagram @consultingprofessors or by email at  [email protected] . 

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 30, 2020 • ( 0 )

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is, perhaps, to this time, the most mature example of a myth of Contemporary life. The chief value of this drama is its attempt to reveal those ultimate meanings which are resident in modern experience. Perhaps the most significant comment on this play is not its literary achievement, as such, but is, rather, the impact which it has had on spectators, both in America and abroad. The influence of this drama, first performed in 1949, continues to grow in World Theatre. For it articulates, in language which can be appreciated by popular audiences, certain new dimensions of the human dilemma.

—Esther Merle Jackson, “ Death of a Salesman : Tragic Myth in the Modern Theatre”

It can be argued that the Great American Novel—that always elusive imaginative summation of the American experience—became the Great American Drama in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman . Along with Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night , Miller’s masterpiece forms the defining myth of the American family and the American dream. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is the play’s only rival in American literature in expressing the tragic side of the American myth of success and the ill-fated American dreamers. A landmark and cornerstone 20th-century drama, Death of a Salesman is crucial in the history of American theater in presenting on stage an archetypal family drama that is simultaneously intimate and representative, social and psychological, realistic and expressionistic. Critic Lois Gordon has called it “the major American drama of the 1940s” that “remains unequalled in its brilliant and original fusion of realistic and poetic techniques, its richness of visual and verbal texture, and its wide range of emotional impact.” Miller’s play, perhaps more than any other, established American drama as the decisive arena for addressing the key questions of American identity and social and moral values, while pioneering methods of expression that liberated American theater. The drama about the life and death of salesman Willy Loman is both thoroughly local in capturing a particular time and place and universal, one of the most popular and adapted American plays worldwide. Willy Loman has become the contemporary Everyman, prompting widespread identification and sympathy. By centering his tragedy on a lower middle-class protagonist—insisting, as he argued in “Tragedy and the Common Man,” that “the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were”—Miller completed the democratization of drama that had begun in the 19th century while setting the terms for a key debate over dramatic genres that has persisted since Death of a Salesman opened in 1949.

Miller’s subjects, themes, and dramatic mission reflect his life experiences, informed by the Great Depression, which he regarded as a “moral catastrophe,” rivaled, in his view, only by the Civil War in its profound impact on American life. Miller was born in 1915, in New York City. His father, who had emigrated from Austria at the age of six, was a successful coat manufacturer, prosperous enough to afford a chauffeur and a large apartment over-looking Central Park. For Miller’s family, an embodiment of the American dream that hard work and drive are rewarded, the stock market crash of 1929 changed everything. The business was lost, and the family was forced to move to considerably reduced circumstances in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn in a small frame house that served as the model for the Lomans’ residence. Miller’s father never fully recovered from his business failure, and his mother was often depressed and embittered by the family’s poverty, though both continued to live in hope of an economic recovery to come. For Miller the depression exposed the hollowness and fragility of the American dream of material success and the social injustice inherent in an economic system that created so many blameless casualties. The paradoxes of American success—its stimulation of both dreams and guilt when lost or unrealized, as well as the conflict it created between self-interest and social responsibility—would become dominant themes in Miller’s work. As a high school student Miller was more interested in sports than studies. “Until the age of seventeen I can safely say that I never read a book weightier than Tom Swift , and Rover Boys, ” Miller recalled, “and only verged on literature with some of Dickens. . . . I passed through the public school system unscathed.” After graduating from high school in 1932 Miller went to work in an auto parts warehouse in Manhattan. It was during his subway commute to and from his job that Miller began reading, discovering both the power of serious literature to change the way one sees the world and his vocation: “A book that changed my life was The Brothers Karamazov which I picked up, I don’t know how or why, and all at once believed I was born to be a writer.”

In 1934 Miller was accepted as a journalism student at the University of Michigan. There he found a campus engaged by the social issues of the day: “The place was full of speeches, meetings and leaflets. It was jumping with Issues. . . . It was, in short, the testing ground for all my prejudices, my beliefs and my ignorance, and it helped to lay out the boundaries of my life.” At Michigan Miller wrote his first play, despite having seen only two plays years before, to compete for prize money he needed for tuition. Failing in his first attempt he would eventually twice win the Avery Hopwood Award. Winning “made me confident I could go ahead from there. It left me with the belief that the ability to write plays is born into one, and that it is a kind of sport of the mind.” Miller became convinced that “with the exception of a doctor saving a life, writing a worthy play was the most important thing a human could do.” He would embrace the role of the playwright as social conscience and reformer who could help change America, by, as he put it “grabbing people and shaking them by the back of the neck.” Two years after graduating in 1938, having moved back to Brooklyn and married his college sweetheart, Miller had completed six plays, all but one of them rejected by producers. The Man Who Had All the Luck, a play examining the ambiguities of success and the money ethic, managed a run of only four performances on Broadway in 1944. Miller went to work at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, tried his hand at radio scripts, and attempted one more play. “I laid myself a wager,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I would hold back this play until I was as sure as I could be that every page was integral to the whole and would work; then, if my judgment of it proved wrong, I would leave the theater behind and write in other forms.” The play was All My Sons, about a successful manufacturer who sells defective aircraft parts and is made to face the consequences of his crime and his responsibilities. It is Miller’s version of a Henrik Ibsen problem play, linking a family drama to wider social issues. Named one of the top-10 plays of 1947, All My Sons won the Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award over Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. The play’s success allowed Miller to buy property in rural Connecticut where he built a small studio and began work on Death of a Salesman .

This play, subtitled “Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem,” about the last 24 hours of an aging and failing traveling salesman misguided by the American dream, began, as the playwright recounts in his introduction to his Collected Plays , with an initial image

of an enormous face the height of the proscenium arch which would appear and then open up, and we would see the inside of a man’s head. In fact, The Inside of His Head was the first title. . . . The image was in direct opposition to the method of All My Sons —a method one might call linear or eventual in that one fact or incident creates the necessity for the next. The Salesman image was from the beginning absorbed with the concept that nothing in life comes “next” but that everything exists together and at the same time within us; that there is no past to be “brought forward” in a human being, but that he is his past at every moment. . . . I wished to create a form which, in itself as a form, would literally be the process of Willy Loman’s way of mind.

The play took shape by staging the past in the present, not through flashbacks of Willy’s life but by what the playwright called “mobile concurrency of past and present.” Miller recalled beginning

with only one firm piece of knowledge and this was that Loman was to destroy himself. How it would wander before it got to that point I did not know and resolved not to care. I was convinced only that if I could make him remember enough he would kill himself, and the structure of the play was determined by what was needed to draw up his memories like a mass of tangled roots without ends or beginning.

At once realistic in its documentation of American family life and expressionistic in its embodiment of consciousness on stage, Death of a Salesman opens with the 63-year-old Willy Loman’s return to his Brooklyn home, revealing to his worried wife, Linda, that he kept losing control of his car on a selling trip to Boston. Increasingly at the mercy of his memories Willy, in Miller’s analysis, “is literally at that terrible moment when the voice of the past is no longer distant but quite as loud as the voice of the present.” Reflecting its protagonist, “The way of telling the tale . . . is as mad as Willy and as abrupt and as suddenly lyrical.” The family’s present—Willy’s increasing mental instability, his failure to earn the commissions he needs to survive, and his disappointment that his sons, Biff and Happy, have failed to live up to expectations—intersects with scenes from the past in which both their dreams and the basis for their disillusionment are exposed. In the present Biff, the onetime star high school athlete with seeming unlimited prospects in his doting father’s estimation, is 34, having returned home from another failed job out west and harboring an unidentified resentment of his father. As Biff confesses, “everytime I come back here I know that all I’ve done is to waste my life.” His brother, Happy, is a deceitful womanizer trapped in a dead-end job who confesses that despite having his own apartment, “a car, and plenty of women . . . still, goddammit, I’m lonely.” The present frustrations of father and sons collide with Willy’s memory when all was youthful promise and family harmony. In a scene in which Biff with the prospect of a college scholarship seems on the brink of attaining all Willy has expected of him, both boys hang on their father’s every word as he exults in his triumphs as a successful salesman:

America is full of beautiful towns and fine, upstanding people. And they know me, boys, they know me up and down New England. The finest people. And when I bring you fellas up, there’ll be open sesame for all of us, ’cause one thing, boys: I have friends. I can park my car in any street in New England, and the cops protect it like their own.

Triumphantly, Willy passes on his secret of success: “Be liked and you will never want.” His advice exposes the fatal fl aw in his life view that defines success by exterior rather than interior values, by appearance and possessions rather than core morals. Even in his confident memory, however, evidence of the undermining of his self-confidence and aspirations occurs as Biff plays with a football he has stolen and father and son ignore the warning of the grind Bernard (who “is liked, but he’s not well liked”) that Biff risks graduating by not studying. Willy’s popularity and prowess as a salesman are undermined by Linda’s calculation of her husband’s declining commissions, prompting Willy to confess that “people don’t seem to take to me.” Invading Willy’s memory is the realization that he is far from the respected and resourceful salesman he has boasted being to his sons as he struggles to meet the payments on the modern appliances that equip the American dream of success. Moreover, to boost his sagging spirits on the road he has been unfaithful to his loving and supportive wife. To protect himself from these hurtful memories Willy is plunged back into the present for a card game with Bernard’s father, Charley. Again the past intrudes in the form of a memory of a rare visit by Willy’s older brother, Ben, who has become rich and whose secrets for success elude Willy. Back in the present Willy is hopeful at Biff’s plan to go see an old employer, Bill Oliver, for the money to start up a Loman Brothers sporting goods line. The act ends with Willy’s memory of Biff’s greatest moment—the high school football championship:

Like a young god. Hercules—something like that. And the sun, the sun all around him. Remember how he waved to me? Right up from the field, with the representatives of three colleges standing by? And the buyers I brought, and the cheers when he came out—Loman, Loman, Loman! God Almighty, he’ll be great yet. A star like that, magnificent, can never really fade away!

The second act shatters all prospects, revealing the full truth that Willy has long evaded about himself and his family in a series of crushing blows. Expecting to trade on his 34 years of loyal service to his employer for a nontraveling, salaried position in New York, Willy is forced to beg for a smaller and smaller salary before he is fired outright, prompting one of the great lines of the play: “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit.” Rejecting out of pride a job offer from Charley, Willy meets his son for dinner where Biff reveals that his get-rich scheme has collapsed. Bill Oliver did not remember who he was, kept him waiting for hours, and resentfully Biff has stolen his fountain pen from his desk. Biff now insists that Willy face the truth—that Biff was only a shipping clerk and that Oliver owes him nothing—but Willy refuses to listen, with his need to believe in his son and the future forcing Biff to manufacture a happier version of his meeting and its outcome. Biff’s anger and resentment over the old family lies about his prospects, however, cause Willy to relive the impetus of Biff’s loss of faith in him in one of the tour de force scenes in modern drama. Biff and Happy’s attempt to pick up two women at the restaurant interconnects with Willy’s memory of Biff’s arrival at Willy’s Boston hotel unannounced. There he discovers a partially dressed woman in his father’s room. Having failed his math class and jeopardized his scholarship, Biff has come to his father for help. Willy’s betrayal of Linda, however, exposes the hollowness of Willy’s moral authority and the disjunction between the dreams Willy sells and its reality:

Willy: She’s nothing to me, Biff. I was lonely, I was terribly lonely.

Biff: You—you gave her Mama’s stockings!

Willy: I gave you an order!

Biff: Don’t touch me, you—liar!

Willy: Apologize for that!

Biff: You fake! You phony little fake! You fake!

Willy’s guilt over the collapse of his son’s belief in him leads him to a final redemptive dream. Returning home, symbolically outside planting seeds, he discusses with Ben his scheme to kill himself for the insurance money as a legacy to his family and a final proof of his worth as a provider of his sons’ success. Before realizing this dream Willy must endure a final assault of truth from Biff who confesses to being nothing more than a thief and a bum, incapable of holding down a job—someone who is, like Willy, a “dime a dozen,” no better than any other hopeless striver: “I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you. You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them!” Biff’s fury explodes into a tearful embrace of his father. After Biff departs upstairs the significance of his words and actions are both realized and lost by the chronic dreamer:

Willy, after a long pause, astonished, elevated Isn’t that—isn’t that remarkable? Biff—he likes me!

Linda: He loves you, Willy!

Happy ,deeply moved Always did, Pop.

Willy: Oh. Biff! Staring wildly: He cried! Cried to me. He is choking with his love, and now cries out his promise: That boy—that boy is going to be magnificent!

Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Plays

Doggedly holding onto the dream of his son’s prospects, sustained by his son’s love, Willy finally sets out in his car to carry out his plan, while the scene shifts to his funeral in which Linda tries to understand her husband’s death, and Charley provides the eulogy:

Nobody dast blame this man. You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake. And then you get a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

Linda delivers the final, heartbreaking lines over her husband’s grave: “Willy. I made the last payment on the house today. Today, dear. And there’ll be nobody home. We’re free and clear. We’re free. We’re free . . . We’re free. . . .”

The power and persistence of Death of a Salesman derives from its remarkably intimate view of the dynamic of a family driven by their collective dreams. Critical debate over whether Willy lacks the stature or self-knowledge to qualify as a tragic hero seems beside the point in performance. Few other modern dramas have so powerfully elicited pity and terror in their audiences. Whether Willy is a tragic hero or Death of a Salesman is a modern tragedy in any Aristotelian sense, he and his story have become core American myths. Few critics worry over whether Jay Gatsby is a tragic hero, but Gatsby shares with Willy Loman the essential American capacity to dream and to be destroyed by what he dreams. The concluding lines of The Great Gatsby equally serve as a requiem for both men:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eludes us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

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The Tragic Hero Death of a Salesman

How it works

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is an appropriate illustration of a tragedy as defined by Aristotle in his Poetics. Willy Loman is the protagonist in Miller’s famous play and has attributes that qualify him as a tragic hero. The Aristotelian tragedy entails the fall of a high esteem person such as a king or ruler as a result of their weakness also known as a tragic flaw. The tragic hero according to Aristotle is brought down by an error also known as harmatia.

A tragedy is a serious play that evokes emotions among the audience who pity with the tragic hero. Aristotle also held that a tragedy ought to arouse the emotions of pity and fear in among the audience through catharsis and purge those emotions. Additionally, Aristotelian tragedy has six elements namely plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song or music. The play Death of Salesman by Arthur Miller qualifies to be a tragedy as defined by Aristotle.

Willy Loman as the protagonist could be said to be the tragic hero in Miller’s play. Unlike the classical or Aristotelian tragedy whereby the hero suffers from an excessive pride, Willy’s tragic flaw is evidenced in his obsession with illusionary vision. Willy is used by the playwright to address the elusiveness of the American dream that would forever remain nothing but an illusion to most people. The protagonist remained fixated in his vision of becoming a successful salesman to the extent that he did not see the harm he was causing himself and the others close to him. Significantly, Willy could be said to have pride to some extent in that he refused to accept reality and continued to believe in his vision.

Willy was once an influential member of the society as a renowned businessman but had fallen from grace to a state of disillusionment and unhappiness. Aristotle regarded tragedy as a serious play with a sad or tragic ending. Miller’s play is as a tragedy emphasized in how Willy ended up committing suicide after realizing that he would never be successful. Willy could not have lived with the harsh reality that he failed from achieving his vision and that he was a terrible husband and father which compelled him to seek refuge in death. Willy left his family with nothing that they could inherit from him in addition to the grief of losing a father and a husband. The protagonist opted for death since he could not adapt to change as he continually made mistakes throughout his life.

The protagonist faces various obstacles as the play develops. Willy was his own biggest obstacle as he failed to accept his shortcomings and failure. Instead of living with the reality and striving to become a better person, Willy opted for the easy way out and committed suicide. Willy made many mistakes in his life, but the fact that he failed to admit that he was wrong gives the play a tragic element. The failure of Willy weighs down on the protagonist, and he leads a miserable life eventually committing suicide. Willy also has to deal with his failing health as he grows older but still sticks to his vision of becoming successful. Willy was no longer as effective in his work as he used to be when he was younger. “After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up more dead than alive” (Miller, 1823). Willy’s thoughts foreshadowed the protagonist’s tragic ending when he decided to take his life.

Miller’s play is a tragedy based not only on the protagonist but also on other characters especially his family. The play is about the failure of a husband who drags his entire family to doom as well. Willy had two sons, but it is apparent that they would inherit his failure and also lead miserable lives in poverty. Willy’s son Biff might have become successful had he accepted to go to college and become a footballer. Willy’s wife Linda is also left in dismay since just like her sons were entirely dependent on Willy. The play is a tragedy since it ends on a sad note with the family being destined to lead a miserable life after the death of their provider. Willy’s entire family gives the play tragic elements as Miller uses the characters to create an atmosphere of misfortune, failure, despair, and tragedy. The play is also a tragedy since it arouses the emotions of pity and fear among the audience.

Miller’s playsuits the Aristotelian guidelines of a tragedy, but the playwright strives to imitate or create a new form of modern tragedy. Miller wrote his famous play in the post world war II era during which the nation was recovering from the toll of war. Miller addressed the aspect of the American dream and its tragic outcomes. Willy was used by Miller to describe the ordinary American citizens who struggle with such issues as financial challenges, parenting roles, and marriage among others. Willy was not the only salesman who led a difficult life as depicted in “… he died the death of a salesman, in his green velvet slippers and smoker… hundreds of salesmen and buyers were at the funeral” (Miller, 1814). Additionally, it is important to note that Miller’s play does not entirely fulfill the Aristotelian definition of a tragedy.

Aristotle holds that a tragic hero has to have a noble background, but Willy as the protagonist is just but an ordinary man. “I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived” (Miller, 1802). However, Willy plays a central role in developing the play as a tragedy as evidenced in how he committed suicide. Lastly, Miller’s Death of a Salesman is a perfect illustration of the modern tragedy that follows the guidelines of the Aristotelian tragedy through the use of such characters as Willy Loman and his family to arouse emotions of pity and sadness among the audience.

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105 Death of a Salesman Essay Topics & Examples

Death of a Salesman is Arthur Miller’s multiple award-winning stage play that explores such ideas as American Dream and family. Our writers have prepared a list of topics and tips on writing the Death of a Salesman thesis statement, essay, or literary analysis.

Words of Sympathy for a Tragic Loss: 25+ Message Ideas

Updated 04/23/2024

Published 08/28/2020

Sam Tetrault, BA in English

Contributing writer

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After a tragic loss, it can be impossible to find the right words to ease this pain. All words have their limits, and it often feels impossible to offer your condolences during someone’s time of need. This is especially true if the loss was sudden or particularly heartbreaking. 

Because it’s important to be there for those you love, it helps to know the best words of sympathy for someone dealing with a tragic loss . In these times, less truly is more.

Don’t feel pressured to overstep boundaries or fully understand how someone is feeling. In fact, it’s better to offer your sympathy in a way that doesn’t take away from what they feel.

If you’re struggling to find the right words, we’ve got you covered. These are the best words of sympathy for a tragic loss with 25+ message ideas for any situation. When in doubt, it’s better to offer some kind of sympathy message than to stay silent.

Jump ahead to these sections:

Words of sympathy for the tragic loss of a spouse or partner, words of sympathy for the tragic loss of a child, words of sympathy for the tragic loss of another loved one.

Losing your life partner is one of the hardest things anyone can experience. Saying you’re sorry for their loss likely doesn’t cover the wide range of feelings they must be going through. Offering one of these messages below won’t take away the pain, but it shows you’re always there to support them. 

1. “I can’t make your pain go away, but I want you to know that I’m always here for you.” 

This is an important way to validate their feelings without overstepping. The best thing you can communicate is that you’ll always be there for them. 

2. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through. You’re always in my thoughts.” 

One common mistake is assuming that you know how someone else is feeling. In reality, you can’t ever understand someone else’s grief from their perspective. Instead, let them know that their feelings are always okay, and you’re thinking of them. 

3. “Harry was one of the kindest people I knew. I’m so grateful to have known him.” 

Another kind thing to say is to compliment the deceased and honor their memory. Keeping this person’s legacy alive is one of the most powerful ways to show support.

4. “You loved each other so much. I know you have the strength to get through this.” 

Again, commenting on their legacy and memory is an effective way to show you care. Still, it’s helpful to remind them that they are strong and capable no matter what. 

5. “She will always be a part of you. I’m keeping you in my thoughts and prayers.” 

One fear after losing someone so important is that they will no longer be a part of your life. Honor their memory by reminding the recipient that their partner will always be with them. 

6. “I will miss him so deeply. He was so loved by all who knew him. Do what you need to take care of yourself. I’m here for you.”

Don’t be afraid to share how you’ll miss the deceased. While you should keep this brief, it’s helpful to know that this pain is shared by all who knew their partner. 

7. “I know this is so difficult, but you have my full support. You are so strong, and I know you will survive this.” 

Don’t underestimate the power of building up your recipient’s strength. In the first moments of grief, it’s hard to know how you’ll get through it. Being there is the best way to help. 

8. “I’ll never forget the Christmas party where Sarah went out of her way to make me feel comfortable. She was one-of-a-kind, and I’ll always remember her. I’m thinking of you.” 

Sharing a memory of the deceased that brings a smile to their face is one of the many ways to honor their memory. Again, keeping these memories alive is worth so much. 

No parent wants to think about the pain of losing a child too soon. Because this is such a traumatic loss, reaching out often feels impossible. Overcome this feeling of intimidation and recognize that any kindness is a gesture of support. 

9. “Though he was only here for a short time, he brought the world so many smiles.” 

Because saying sorry for your loss is rarely enough in this situation, remind them that their time here mattered. When kids are taken too soon, parents worry that their legacy will fade quickly. In reality, this is a memory that lasts a lifetime. 

10. “I’m so deeply sorry for what you’re going through. I am sharing in your sorrow. Please let us know if you need anything.” 

It’s okay to say you’re sorry for what they’re experiencing. That feeling is only natural, but also shows how you’re there for support. 

11. “No matter what you’re feeling, remember that you’re not alone. We are here for you.” 

The best thing you can do after an event like this is to make it clear that the parent(s) are not alone. You’ll be there for whatever it is they need. 

12. “The world was a better place because she was here.” 

Though the parent might have only had their child here for a short time, the world is different and better for having this person in it. Don’t shy away from mentioning this truth to the bereaved parent. 

13. “He will always be with you in the memories you have and the stories your family will tell. I will never forget him.” 

Let the parent know that you will keep their child in your memory forever. This is one of the best ways to honor their legacy, which continues to live on after death.

14. “Words fail in this situation to describe what you must be feeling. I care about you, and I share in your sadness.” 

Again, sometimes words fail. It’s okay to admit that instead of saying something you don’t mean. Saying you care is enough. 

15. “Keeping you in my warmest prayers during this loss.” 

It helps to know that people are thinking of you in your time of need. This helps dull the feelings of loneliness and grief. 

16. “I know it’s been a while since you lost Henry. I wanted to let you know that I haven’t forgotten, and I’m still thinking of you.” 

More importantly than reaching out immediately after the tragic loss, it’s also important to continue giving ongoing support months after the death. Remind them that you haven’t forgotten their pain or grief. 

If someone you love lost someone important, you can still offer your sympathy through a kind message. The same principles of remembrance and support stand strong no matter what type of loss they experienced. 

17. “What an amazing person Cara was. She led a remarkable life, and I’m so lucky to have known her. Thinking of you.”

Honor the memory of the deceased person by sharing how much you admired them. Though they might be gone, their memory still lives on. 

18. “It will take time to go through the shock of this loss. I’m always here for you for whatever you need.” 

Acknowledge that this is a difficult time and that it might take time to recover. As long as you’re willing to be there, you’re doing the right thing. 

19. “My heart goes out to your entire family.” 

If you don’t know the individual that well, it’s okay to keep your message brief. Less really is more, so empathize with their pain with this message. 

20. “I didn’t have the chance to get to know Kim, but I know she must have been someone special.” 

If you don’t know the deceased person, comment on the type of person they must have been to be so close to your recipient. 

21. “It’s always so hard to say goodbye. I’m thinking of you right now.” 

No matter who you lose, the grief of goodbye always hits hard. You can empathize with this feeling without overstepping your boundaries or saying you know exactly how someone feels. 

22. “You’ll always remember the laughs you shared and the fun times you have. I hope those memories are a comfort to you.” 

Reminding the individual that their loved one will always be with them goes a long way towards helping with those initial feelings of grief. 

23. “No words will do justice to the impact he had on his family and the world.” 

Again, referencing their legacy is a powerful sentiment that can mean so much to someone after a loss. 

24. “I hope we can continue to celebrate the life of Jordan in everything we do.” 

While they might not be ready to move on to life’s next chapter, they are likely willing to find new ways to remember the one they love. 

25. “I’m here to listen, comfort, and be there during this time.” 

Lastly, honor their loss by being there as a source of comfort in whatever way they need.

Offer Kindness When They Need It Most

Your words carry a lot of power. Offering kindness when they need it most goes a long way, even if your message feels simple at the time. Whether you’re wondering how to comfort a grieving friend via text message or how to write a sympathy card, these messages above are a great place to start. 

The most important thing to keep in mind is that any type of support is a gesture of kindness. It really is the thought that counts. Being there for someone in their darkest days shows that you’re not afraid to be there for them no matter what the future holds. 

If you're looking for more ways to express your condolences, read our guides on sympathy food delivery and sympathy throw blanket ideas .

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Jessica Grose

When there’s no safe place for your adult son or daughter.

By Jessica Grose

Opinion Writer

These mothers keep their phones on silent because their nerves are fried. Every time they hear a ring, they know it could be awful news, and their minds and bodies tense up — over and over again for years.

Their adult children have serious mental health issues or ongoing substance abuse issues or both. One woman, whose son has severe mental illness and has been showing signs of emotional dysregulation since he was a small child, said that sometimes the phone would ring and “I didn’t know if it was a nurse calling to let me know she had to give him Tylenol or if they were calling to let me know that the sheriff’s office was there and they had to pull out the Tasers. I never knew.” Another woman, whose daughter struggles with mental health issues, said, “Anytime I hear that ring in a movie or anything, I have a dramatic reaction to it.”

I heard these stories when I sat in on several support groups run by Judith Smith, a psychotherapist and the author of “Difficult: Mothering Challenging Adult Children Through Conflict and Change.” I agreed to allow these women to remain anonymous so that they could speak candidly about their children’s struggles without further risking alienation or estrangement from them. (The groups I visited are for mothers, but many fathers manage the care of their mentally ill adult children as well.)

I interviewed Smith about “Difficult” in 2022, and since then, the problems experienced by families of difficult adult children really haven’t improved.

While there was variation in these families’ histories, the women I heard from hit similar bleak notes. A common story went something like this: An adult child had severe mental illness but wasn’t medication compliant because he or she hated the side effects or suffered from anosognosia , an inability to recognize one’s own illness.

Several women reported that even if their children consented to proper treatment and allowed their parents into the process, the treatment they sought could be nearly impossible to obtain. Sometimes insurance wouldn’t cover long-term care, or the availability of care was illusory: On paper, for example, there might be 10 psychiatrists in a given state who saw schizophrenic patients. But in reality, none of them were taking new patients, or they didn’t accept Medicaid, or they practiced hundreds of miles away. The women talked of countless hours spent looking into disparate health care options and coming up empty.

Some said that their adult children experienced periods of homelessness, leading them to worry that their children would end up in the penal system for nonviolent offenses or for simply acting out in public. (Some women, though, acknowledged feeling a small measure of relief in some situations when the police became involved, because that eventually led to their children getting needed medication.)

Worst-case scenarios constantly run through their minds, because there’s almost nowhere that their kids can truly be safe. In some instances, parents had to watch their children deteriorate horribly before they could get them help they needed, because in our legal system, the bar for involuntary psychiatric commitment is dangerousness to oneself or others , though the way that is interpreted varies by jurisdiction.

Jerri Clark — whose son Calvin was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and “crashed through every crack in the system,” she said, before dying by suicide at age 23 — became an advocate for parents like her. When adult children are seriously mentally ill and won’t seek treatment on their own, she said, their families are faced with wrenching choices. “Those families are generally told, ‘Stop enabling them. You have to let them fall to rock bottom or they’ll never get any help.’” Or parents are informed, “‘We will be able to intervene if they actually hurt you.’ So, effectively, families are told to put themselves in harm’s way. Those are basically the choices that the system gives us.” One study described this dilemma as choosing “the best of the hells.”

Dr. Paul Appelbaum, the director of the division of law, ethics and psychiatry at Columbia, told me that in these situations, family members are often “aware that if they turn the child out of the house, not only is that sort of turning the risk loose on society, but they’re also increasing the risk to their child.” He said mentally ill individuals are at greater risk of being victims of violent crimes than members of the general population are.

This week, my newsroom colleague Glenn Thrush reported on the tragic death of Markus Johnson, “who suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia,” in an Illinois prison. Thrush wrote, “The country’s jails and prisons have become its largest provider of inpatient mental health treatment, with 10 times as many seriously mentally ill people now held behind bars as in hospitals.” Meanwhile, the number of state hospital beds for people with severe mental illness “ reached a historic low of 36,150 ” in 2023, according to a January report from the Treatment Advocacy Center.

What can be done to help these families?

First, as The Times’s editorial board argued in 2022, we need to revisit the idea of building a community mental health system like the one envisioned by President John F. Kennedy in the 1960s. Between the ’60s and the 1990s, most of the state inpatient psychiatric hospitals closed. These hospitals were supposed to be replaced by “some 1,500 community mental health centers across the country, each of which would provide five essential services: community education, inpatient and outpatient facilities, emergency response and partial hospitalization programs,” the editorial board said. But Kennedy’s vision never materialized.

Many of the women said that supportive housing like what the community mental health centers could offer was at the top of their policy lists. It would require considerable resources, but as the editorial board wrote, the costs “would be partly offset by what police departments, jails and hospitals could save.”

Several of the women expressed worries about situations involving their children and police officers who aren’t sufficiently trained to deal with serious mental illness. “When they get a call for a mentally disturbed person, a SWAT team showed up at my house, and they don’t know how to talk to them,” said one parent. She wanted police officers to get more training and to be accompanied by counselors. Some cities, like Eugene, Ore., and Los Angeles are experimenting with sending unarmed civilian workers with mental health training to attend to people in crisis.

Dr. Appelbaum said it may be time to rethink the dangerousness standard for involuntary commitment. While he doesn’t want to see the bar return to being too low, as it often was 50 years ago , “One could imagine narrower criteria that allowed the involuntary hospitalization of someone who was clearly mentally ill” and “deteriorating and lacking the ability to recognize their situation,” he said. In essence, “a competence or capacity criterion that would be added to the presence of illness” to provide alternative grounds for hospitalization.

Something that all of the women agreed on was the need for more understanding and support from others in their lives. They said many friends and family members either backed away from them completely or gave them unhelpful or insulting advice. They felt that if their children had had physical rather than mental illnesses, that understanding would have been there. But, one woman said, “when it’s mental health or drugs, there’s always somebody who wants to tell you, ‘Just solve it.’ And there’s always an implication that you didn’t do that, you didn’t try hard enough.” She added, “We do that enough to ourselves.”

These women find great solace in one another. They take pleasure in one another’s company and in indulging in a little bit of dark humor to keep them going, even as they express frustration that their problems seem invisible to the rest of society.

At the end of one session, one woman ended with a plea for me to pass on: “The homeless that you run into in a place like New York City — it’s easy to judge them,” she said, but “those people, by and large, have mothers that care about them greatly and are worried about them and how to get them help.” When you see them, she said, think not only about how they’re suffering but also about the loving people who are suffering alongside them, worried about what they’re going to hear the next time they pick up the phone.

Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.

Tragic News – The Passing of Chris Edley, Visionary and Beloved Dean

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Message from Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, May 10, 2024:

Dear Berkeley Law Community,

It is with a very heavy heart that I am writing to inform you that our beloved colleague and former dean Chris Edley died on Friday morning.

Chris had an amazing life and career, including being a transformative dean for Berkeley Law.

Chris graduated from Swarthmore College and the Harvard School of Public Policy and Harvard Law School. He then had an exemplary career in academia and in public service.

Chris spent 23 years as a professor at Harvard Law School, including co-founding the Harvard Civil Rights Project, before coming to Berkeley Law as dean in 2004. He served as dean until 2013. As dean, he made an enormous positive difference in every aspect of the law school, from the hiring of many terrific faculty, to his initiative to build the south addition (with the library and classrooms and Café Zeb), to dramatically increasing support for public interest grants for students, to the creation of many centers.

Chris served in White House policy and budget positions under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Chris also held senior positions in five presidential campaigns: policy director for Michael Dukakis (1988); and senior policy adviser for Al Gore (2000), Howard Dean (2004), Barack Obama (2008), and Hillary Clinton (2016). In 1993, he was a senior economic adviser in the Clinton Presidential Transition, responsible for housing and regulation of financial institutions. In 2008, he was a board member for the Obama presidential transition, with general responsibility for healthcare, education, and immigration. In 1993, he was a senior economic adviser in the Clinton Presidential Transition, responsible for housing and regulation of financial institutions. In 2008, he was a board member for the Obama presidential transition, with general responsibility for healthcare, education, and immigration. From 2011-2013, he co-chaired the congressionally chartered National Commission on Education Equity and Excellence.

Chris was a fellow or member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences; the National Academy of Public Administration; the Council on Foreign Relations; the American Law Institute; the Advisory Board of the Hamilton Project, the Brookings Institution; and the board of Inequality Media. He is a National Associate of the National Research Council, the operating arm of the National Academies of Science, for which he chaired a committee to evaluate NAEP performance standards, and a committee to design a national system of education equity indicators.

Since completing his deanship, he has served the Law School and the campus in countless ways, including recently serving for two years as the Interim Dean of the School of Education. Chris and Maria Echaveste directed the Opportunity Institute.

Chris and I were law school classmates. He has been a dear friend and has provided me invaluable wisdom and support in my years as a dean. I know I speak for all of us in saying how terribly much we will miss him.

I will keep you posted of plans for memorials.

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William Shakespeare with characters from his tragedies; illustration by John Broadley

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This essay appears, in somewhat different form, as the introduction to Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life (Head of Zeus, 2024).

In his best-selling biography of Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson tries to explain how a man who attempts such “epic feats” can also be “an asshole.” He finds himself seeking help from William Shakespeare: “As Shakespeare teaches us, all heroes have flaws, some tragic, some conquered, and those we cast as villains can be complex.” How better to fill the gap between epic and asshole than with the lesson Shakespeare was apparently trying to teach us when he wrote Hamlet and King Lear ? The only other time the word “tragic” appears in Isaacson’s book is when Musk is regretting his choice of outfit for an audience with the pope: “My suit is tragic.” When tragedy encompasses such trivialities, it’s not so hard to believe that those great plays really are trying to teach us something as trite as the possibility that humans are complex or that powerful people may have some serious defects. Who knew?

Isaacson is not unusual in making such statements about what Shakespeare’s tragedies mean: they exist to instruct us, and their main lesson is that everything would be OK if only we could “conquer” our shortcomings. We can read in The Guardian , of the Harry Potter novels, that “some of the most admirable adult characters, as in Shakespeare, are also revealed to have a tragic flaw that causes them to hesitate to act, to make foolish errors of judgment, to lie, or even to commit murder.” The New York Times informs us that

with Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, their tragic flaws, enacted, became the definition of tragedy. It may be angst (Hamlet), or hubris (Faustus), but it’s there and we know, watching, that the ruinous end will be of their own making.

The former British prime minister Boris Johnson, who has supposedly been writing a book about Shakespeare, and who compared himself in the dying days of his benighted regime to Othello beset by malign Iago, claims that “it is the essence of all tragic literature that the hero should be conspicuous, that he should swagger around and that some flaw should lead to a catastrophic reversal and collapse.”

Also in The New York Times Stephen Marche tells us that

we go to tragedy to watch a man be destroyed. Macbeth must be destroyed for his lust for power, Othello for his jealousy, Antony for his passion, Lear for the incompleteness of his renunciation. They are tragic precisely because their flaws are all too human.

In a review of a biography of Andrew Jackson, the president is called a “‘Shakespearean tragic hero,’ inflexible as Coriolanus, whose tragic flaw was ‘his incessant pursuit of virtue in the political realm.’” Maureen Dowd notes that Barack Obama “has read and reread Shakespeare’s tragedies” and “does not want his fatal flaw to be that he compromises so much that his ideals get blurred out of recognition.”

This stuff is part of the language. Like most clichés, it perpetuates assumptions, not just about Shakespeare but about the world: your ruinous end is of your own making. Tragedies happen not because human beings are dragged between large historical, social, and political forces that are wrenching them in opposite directions, but because individuals are branded from birth with one or another variant of original sin. In seeking to understand ourselves, we can forget the epic and think of the assholes—who receive satisfyingly just deserts. As Johnson put it in 2011, Shakespeare “was, frankly, the poet of the established order” because the troublemakers in his plays “get their comeuppance.” The tragically flawed heroes meet the gory deaths their flaws deserve. Alongside “many insights into the human heart,” Johnson tells us, Shakespeare provides “such ingenious defences for keeping things as they are, and keeping the ruling party in power.”

The most obvious problem with all that is, even if it were true, it would be crushingly dull. Moral tales in which people do bad things because they have wicked instincts and then get their comeuppance are ten a penny. The clichés shrink Shakespeare to the level of Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest , the author of a three-volume novel of “more than usually revolting sentimentality” who explains that in her book “the good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” If the definition of tragedy lies in the tragic flaw of the protagonist, we are reduced to a monotonous game of matching the shortcoming to the character: Hamlet = angst; Macbeth = ambition; Othello = jealousy; Lear = reckless vanity.

Fortunately none of this bears even a passing resemblance to the experience of seeing or reading a Shakespeare play. It is terrifyingly clear to us as we encounter these dramas that we are not in a moral universe of comeuppances and rewarded virtue. “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods:/They kill us for their sport,” says Gloucester in King Lear . Macduff’s children are slaughtered. Ophelia is driven to drown herself. At the end of Othello , there are two innocent corpses on the stage: Desdemona’s and Emilia’s. Lear’s terrible question over the dead body of Cordelia echoes through these tragedies: “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,/And thou no breath at all?” Much of the time in Shakespeare, there is no answer.

There is nothing in Cordelia’s or Ophelia’s or Desdemona’s or Emilia’s characters that has led them to extinction. It is simply that in this cruel world, while the bad may indeed end unhappily, so may the good. At the end of King Lear , we have the rather pitiful Albany doing a Miss Prism act: “All friends shall/Taste the wages of their virtue and all foes/The cup of their deservings.” This assurance of just deserts is immediately undercut by one of the most devastating images of absurd injustice, Lear raging at a universe in which his blameless daughter will not take another breath, in this world or the next: “Never, never, never, never, never!”

If the tragedies are supposed to show us the playing out of the innate flaws of their protagonists, they are not very good . Does anyone ever come out of the theater thinking that if only Hamlet had been less angsty, nothing would have been rotten in the state of Denmark? If Macbeth is already consumed by a lust for power, why does his wife have to goad him into killing Duncan? If Othello has an innate instinct for psychotic jealousy, why does Iago have to stage such elaborate plots to get him to believe that Desdemona is cheating on him? Lear may indeed be old and foolish, but he was surely not always thus—the shock of his decision at the beginning of the play to divest himself of the kingdom stems from his having ruled successfully for a very long time. (In the traditional story that Shakespeare adapted and that his audience would have known, Lear had reigned for sixty years.)

As for Shakespeare being “the poet of the established order,” it is certainly true that he was extremely adept in his navigation of a treacherous political landscape in which his greatest predecessor, Christopher Marlowe, was most probably murdered by the state and another fellow dramatist Thomas Kyd died after torture. He did so largely by avoiding references to contemporary England and setting his plays either in distant Catholic countries (where of course they do things no good Protestant ruler would countenance) or in the past. His political skill was rewarded. As of May 1603, after James I’s accession to the throne, Shakespeare was an official of the court as Groom of the Chamber. He and his fellow shareholders in the King’s Men (as they were now called) were each issued with four and a half yards of red cloth for the royal livery in which they were allowed to appear on state occasions. It is hard to think of Shakespeare as a liveried servant, but for him that red coat was surely also a suit of armor that protected him from the violence of his surroundings.

The wonder, though, lies in what he did with that position. He took his royal master’s obsessions and made unprecedented dramas out of them. James was interested in witches, so they appear in Macbeth . The king was—after the Gunpowder Plot in which Catholic conspirators tried to blow him up, along with his entire court and Parliament—worried about the way Catholic suspects under interrogation gave equivocal answers to avoid incriminating themselves. So the Porter in Macbeth , imagining himself as the gatekeeper to Hell, says, “Faith, here’s an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven.” As a Scot, James was anxious to establish the idea of Britain as a political union, with himself as “emperor of the whole island.” So Shakespeare shows in King Lear the terrors of a disunited kingdom. James was fascinated by demonic possession, so Shakespeare brushed up on its alleged symptoms in contemporary accounts and has Edgar, in his guise as Poor Tom, enact them on the blasted heath. *

But if these plays start with the need of the King’s Man to suck up to his royal patron, they emphatically do not end there. A hack propagandist of the kind that Boris Johnson imagines Shakespeare to be would have shown, in Macbeth , that equivocation is just what you might expect from traitorous Catholics. Instead he makes the slipperiness of words and the inability to trust people universal aspects of life under rulers who imagine their power to be absolute. Almost everyone in Macbeth plays games with truth and lies, because that’s what you have to do in a murderous polity.

Poor Tom, in King Lear , may be there to flatter the sovereign’s desire to see a man who is (or is pretending to be) possessed by demons. But we don’t care about that because his performance becomes a heartbreakingly real enactment of mental distress: “The foul fiend haunts poor Tom in the voice of a nightingale. Hoppedance cries in Tom’s belly for two white herring. Croak not, black angel. I have no food for thee.” What begins with a brilliant opportunist keeping an eye out for what will appeal to his new master ends as some of the strangest, most searingly painful language ever spoken on the stage.

And even though Shakespeare undoubtedly started King Lear as a fable on the dangers of splitting up the kingdom, he lets it run off into the most devastating mockery of all arbitrary political power. Lear tells Gloucester that the “great image of authority” is a cur biting the heels of a beggar. It is perhaps not surprising that someone who thought Lear’s declaration that “a dog’s obeyed in office” is Shakespeare supporting the established order proved to be such a dog in office himself.

So what does Shakespeare teach us? Nothing. His tragic theater is not a classroom. It is a fairground wall of death in which the characters are being pushed outward by the centrifugal force of the action but held in place by the friction of the language. It sucks us into its dizzying spin. What makes it particularly vertiginous is the way Shakespeare so often sets our moral impulses against our theatrical interests. Iago in Othello is perhaps the strongest example. Plays, for the audience, begin with utter ignorance. We need someone to draw us in, to tell us what is going on. A character who talks to us, who gives us confidential information, can earn our gratitude. Even when that character is, like Iago, telling us how he is going to destroy a good man, we are glad to see him whenever he appears. Within the plot he is a monster. Outside it, talking to us, he is a charming, helpful presence. Drawn between these two conditions, we are not learning something. We are in the dangerous condition of unlearning how we feel and think.

Hamlet talks to us too. He is entertaining, brilliant, sensitive, charismatic, startlingly eloquent—and he has a filial purpose of vengeance that we understand. So what are we to do with his astonishing cruelties—his cold-blooded mockery of the corpse of a man (Polonius) he has just killed by mistake, his mental torturing of Ophelia, his casual dispatch of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, announced to us as a fleeting afterthought? How far would the play have to tilt on its axis for Hamlet to be not its hero but its resident demon?

Shakespeare can, when he chooses, turn our attitudes to characters upside down and inside out. In the first act of Macbeth , Lady Macbeth is bold, vigorous, and supremely confident that she can “chastise with the valor of my tongue” a husband whom we already know to be a fearsome warrior. She makes herself “from the crown to the toe top-full/Of direst cruelty!” In the second act she takes charge while her husband is breaking down under the strain of Duncan’s murder—it is Lady Macbeth who returns the daggers to the chamber and smears the sleeping grooms with blood. In the third act she is still a commanding presence, able to deal with the disaster of the royal banquet and dismiss the courtiers when Macbeth is freaked out by Banquo’s ghost.

We then lose sight of her until the fifth act, when she is suddenly almost a ghost herself, a somnambulist reenacting in tormented sleep the moments after the murder. There is no transition, nothing to lead us gradually from the direly cruel and potent murderer to the fragile shell of a person, floating in “this slumbery agitation”—a phrase that almost cancels itself and thus captures her descent to nothingness.

Even as the action of the play continues to hurtle forward, we are thrown back into this gap between the dynamic woman we last saw and the strange creature she is now, in this liminal state between life and death. We have to try to fill that gap for ourselves, but we can’t quite do it because the stage is suddenly filled with drums and flags and Birnam Wood is about to come to Dunsinane and we have no time to think. Nor do we know quite what to feel—should we still despise her for her ruthless malice or give ourselves over to the poignancy of her mental dissolution?

Usually, if a dramatist shows us an act of extreme violence perpetrated by a character, it is a point of no return. After the enactment of butchery there can be no way back to emotional delicacy and poetic grace. Yet Hamlet stabs Polonius to death, calls the dead man a fool and a knave, tells his mother, in one of Shakespeare’s most brutal phrases, that “I’ll lug the guts into the neighbor room,” and exits dragging the body along like the carcass of an animal. It makes no sense that even after this shocking display of callousness, Hamlet still gets to be the tender philosopher considering the skull of Yorick. But he does. He is still the “sweet prince.”

Lady Macduff’s young son is stabbed to death before our eyes by Macbeth’s thugs. We watch a child—perhaps the most intelligent, charming, and engaging child ever seen onstage—being slaughtered in front of his mother. Yet fifteen or twenty minutes later we have the psychokiller Macbeth at his most affecting, playing the still, sad music of humanity: “And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.”

Othello wakes the sleeping Desdemona and twice calls her a strumpet. We listen to her heartbreaking plea: “Kill me tomorrow; let me live tonight.” In most productions, she tries to run away and Othello has to manhandle her back onto the bed. Then he takes a cushion and, as she continues to struggle for life, begins to smother her. But this is not quick. A short, staccato phrase of Othello’s, “So, so,” suggests that, as she continues to fight him, he either stabs her or pushes the cushion down even more violently on her face. But still Shakespeare prolongs the agony, for her and for us. Emilia appears at the door and gives Othello the news of Rodrigo’s murder. All the while Othello is still trying to kill his wife. We hear Desdemona’s voice again. Emilia opens the curtains and sees Desdemona dying. She gets two more lines and then expires. As Othello says himself: “I know this act shows horrible and grim.”

It is hard to think how Shakespeare could have made it more horrible. Depending on the production, it can take around ten minutes from start to finish. What could we feel except loathing and disgust? And yet Shakespeare forces us also, within just a few more minutes, to feel compassion for “one that loved not wisely, but too well;/…one not easily jealous but, being wrought,/Perplexed in the extreme.” It is not just Othello who is perplexed in the extreme. As audiences or as readers, we are left in a no-man’s-land where what we feel does not map onto what we have seen, and where extreme ugliness of action alternates with extreme beauty of language.

And all the while that language is unsettling us further. Some of this is accidental: the passage of time has altered meanings, making the effects even stranger and more disconcerting than Shakespeare meant them to be. Words become treacherous because we think we understand them but in fact do not. In the opening scene of Hamlet alone, “rivals” means companions and “extravagant” means wandering. In the first scene of Othello , “circumstance” means circumlocution, “spinster” means someone who spins wool, “peculiar” means personal, and “owe” means own. We can never be quite sure of the linguistic ground beneath our feet. Especially as we experience these words aurally in the theater, stepping stones turn out to be trip hazards.

This effect may be unintended in itself (Shakespeare cannot have known how the English language would evolve over four centuries), but it merely exaggerates what Shakespeare is doing anyway: simultaneously offering and withholding meaning. One way he does this is with a figure of speech that is peculiar in his own sense, personal to him. A distinctive strand of his writing is his fondness for expressing one concept with two words, joined together by “and.” No one has ever made such a humble three-letter word so slippery.

For example, when Hamlet thinks of Fortinbras’s army going off to invade Poland, he remarks that the warriors are willing to die “for a fantasy and trick of fame.” Laertes warns Ophelia against “the shot and danger of desire.” Shakespeare uses this device sixty-six times in Hamlet , twenty-eight times in Othello (“body and beauty”), eighteen times in Macbeth (“sound and fury”) and fifteen times in King Lear (“the image and horror of it”). With these conjunctions, every take is a double take. When we hear “and,” we expect the two things being joined together either to be different yet complementary (the day was cold and bright) or obviously the same (Musk is vile and loathsome).

Shakespeare does use such obvious phrasing, but often he gives us conjunctions that are neither quite the same nor quite different. A trick and a fantasy are alike but not exactly. The shot and the danger are closely related but separate concepts, as are sound and fury. Sometimes our brains can adjust fairly easily: “The image and horror” can be put back together as a horrible image. The “shot and danger” is a dangerous shot. But sometimes they can’t. When Hamlet tells the players that the purpose of theater is to show “the very age and body of the time,” we get the overall idea: they should embody the life of their own historical period. But the individual pieces of the phrase don’t cohere. The time does not have a body—it is the thing to be embodied by the actors. The “age of the time” borders on tautology. When Hamlet talks of his father’s tomb opening “his ponderous and marble jaws,” we must work quite hard to get to what is being signified, which is the heavy marble construction of the tomb. That banal little word “and” leaves us in a place somewhere between comprehension and mystery.

Shakespeare also does this with the basic construction of his sentences. As readers or members of an audience, we are hungry for information, and exposition is one of the basic skills of the playwright. But Shakespeare loves to spool out facts like someone gradually feeding out the line of a kite, adjusting to the tug and tension of the words. He leaves us waiting even while we are being informed. A sentence has a subject, a verb, and an object. Shakespeare delights in separating them from one another to the point where they are almost cut adrift. Early in Hamlet , Horatio is giving us some important backstory: how Old Hamlet acquired Norwegian lands and how Fortinbras is trying to get them back. He starts simply: “Our last king…” He then takes eight words to get to the verb “was” and then another fifteen words to get to “dared to the combat.” And then we have another fifteen words before we find out that Old Hamlet killed Old Fortinbras in this duel.

Or in the second scene of Macbeth , we need to know that Macbeth has triumphed against the rebels on the battlefield. The Captain, bringing the news, tells us that “brave Macbeth…carved out his passage” through the ranks of the enemy. But between “brave Macbeth” and “carved out his passage” there are nineteen words. Lear, in the crucial caprice that catalyzes the tragedy, demands: “Tell me, my daughters…Which of you shall we say doth love us most.” Except what he actually says is:

Tell me, my daughters, Since now we will divest us both of rule, Interest of territory, cares of state, Which of you shall we say doth love us most.

We have to hang on for the dramatic point. This happens again and again in these plays: the language is used to keep us in states of suspended animation. The propulsive rhythms keep the words moving forward with a relentless energy. (Otherwise, we would lose patience and conclude that Shakespeare is really quite a bad writer.) But the import of the words lags behind. This is Shakespeare’s marvelous kind of syncopation: the meter is regular but the meaning is offbeat.

Frank Kermode, riffing on T.S. Eliot, wrote of how a strange piece of language opens up “the bewildering minute, the moment of dazzled recognition” for which all poetry searches. These plays work toward those bewildering minutes when we both recognize something as profoundly human and are at the same time so dazzled by it that we cannot quite take it in. Some of these moments are elaborately linguistic: Hamlet’s contemplations of whether or not he should continue to exist, Macbeth’s articulation of the ways in which his violence has utterly isolated him from humanity itself. But some are almost wordless. There is Lear’s terrible “Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh!” over the body of his dead daughter and Othello’s “Oh, Oh, Oh!” when he realizes that he has murdered his wife for no reason. Shakespeare can make his eternal minutes from the most exquisite artifice or from the most primitive of sounds, knowing as he does that when words fail, after all the astounding articulacy we have been experiencing, the failure is itself unfathomably expressive.

None of this has anything to do with moral instruction. Moral destruction may be more like it: creating the “form and pressure” of the times through a great unraveling, in which what we know becomes un-known. If we have to go back to Aristotle’s theories of tragedy to understand what Shakespeare is doing, the place to go is not his idea of the fatal flaw—a concept Aristotle drew from Greek plays that could hardly be more different from Shakespeare’s. It is, rather, to Aristotle’s identification of the emotions that tragedy seeks to draw out of us: pity and terror. In Shakespeare’s tragedies, we have to supply the pity ourselves because there is precious little of it on offer to the people caught up in the violence of arbitrary power. But there is an abundance of terror. “Security,” says one of the witches in Macbeth , “is mortals’ chiefest enemy.” To feel secure is to be unprepared for the duplicity of reality. Shakespeare gives us crash courses in every kind of insecurity: physical, emotional, psychological, cognitive, even existential.

Ross, in the same play, explains to the soon to be murdered Lady Macduff:

But cruel are the times when we are traitors And do not know ourselves; when we hold rumor From what we fear, yet know not what we fear, But float upon a wild and violent sea…

This could be applied to all these tragedies, in which fear itself cannot be defined or contained. The plays are wild and violent seas on which even the boundaries of terror cannot be charted. If you had to live in one of them, your best course would be to listen to what a messenger tells Lady Macduff: “If you will take a homely man’s advice,/Be not found here; hence with your little ones.”

These violent wildernesses are not created by the flaws in Shakespeare’s characters. The jumpy guards on the battlements at Elsinore as Hamlet begins are not watching out for ghosts: war is already coming, as Young Fortinbras threatens to invade if the lands Old Hamlet seized from Norway are not returned. Before Macbeth even meets the witches, Scotland is beset by civil war and invasion. The play proper opens with the question: “What bloody man is that?” The still-bleeding Captain delivers gory descriptions of a man being cut in two and of his severed head being displayed on the battlements. Macbeth and Banquo are said “to bathe in reeking wounds.” As the action of Othello is beginning, messages are already arriving in Venice with news of the coming Turkish assault on Cyprus—war has begun. The only one of the four protagonists in the tragedies who can be said to unleash large-scale violence by his own actions is Lear—but even then, the speed with which his kingdom falls apart after his abdication makes us wonder whether it would not have descended into chaos anyway if he had merely died of old age.

What we encounter, then, is nothing so comforting as imperfect men causing trouble that will be banished by their deserved deaths. It is men who embody the hurly-burly that, contrary to the predictions of the witches at the start of Macbeth , is never going to be “done.” Hamlet and Macbeth, Othello and Lear are distinguished in these dramas by the illusion that they can determine events by their own actions. They have, they believe, the power to say what will happen next. But no amount of power can ever be great enough in an irrational world. The universe does not follow orders. That, as Miss Prism might have said, is what Tragedy means.

It is nice to imagine a time when these plays could be loved for their poetry alone. It would be a delight to think that their pleasure would be that they speak, as Horatio has it at the end of Hamlet , to an “unknowing world/How these things came about.” But there is not yet a world that does not know the violence of these plays or the fury with which reality responds to all attempts to force it to obey one man’s will. There is no place in history where “Be not found here” is not good advice for millions of vulnerable people. We return to the tragedies not in search of behavioral education but because the wilder the terror Shakespeare unleashes, the deeper is the pity and the greater the wonder that, even in the howling tempest, we can still hear the voices of broken individuals so amazingly articulated. They do not, when they speak, reduce the frightfulness. They allow us, rather, in those bewildering moments, to be equal to it.

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Fintan O’Toole is the Advising Editor at The New York Review and a columnist for The Irish Times . His most recent book is We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland . (June 2024)

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Mica Miller: John Paul Miller not 'feeling any grief' after wife's tragic death, claims behavioral analyst

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the National Suicide Hotline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255)

LUMBER RIVER STATE PARK, NORTH CAROLINA: A body language expert has cast doubt on the sincerity of pastor John-Paul Miller 's emotions following the suicide of his wife, Mica Miller .

"We don't see grief, the little bit of grief … is taken away by a smile," behavioral analyst Scott Rouse said. "And a smile is more prevalent than his grief."

Mica Miller had filed for divorce before her death

Mica's death, which attracted national attention, was ruled a suicide by the sheriff's office. The 30-year-old from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound on April 27 at Lumber River State Park in North Carolina .

Miller was served with divorce papers just two days before Mica's body was discovered in Robeson County. Notably, she had filed for divorce in October 2023, though the case was dismissed in February.

Mica sought separation from Miller in mid-April and posted a Facebook video on March 22, offering advice to those in abusive relationships. Shortly before the video, she had informed a police officer that she was "afraid for her life."

Insights into John-Paul Miller's behavior in wake of wife's tragic suicide

Mica's family has accused Miller, a local pastor, of making exaggerated claims about her mental health, which led to her involuntary commitment to a psychiatric facility. Despite these allegations, Miller has not been charged in connection with his wife's death and has denied any involvement.

Investigators noted that he was "not in North Carolina on the night before and the day of" her death, as reported by MEAWW .

However, Rouse remains unconvinced by Miller's demeanor. "I don't think he's feeling any grief here," Rouse commented while viewing a video of Miller, per NewsNation .

"We're not hearing it in his voice. He's under the impression when you're sad that your voice goes way high. His voice is way too clean for this, way too clean for him to be as sad as he's saying that he is."

Robeson County Sheriff Burnis Wilkins said in a media release, "While I know it's not what many people wanted to hear, the evidence is quite clear and compelling, and we are as saddened as anyone that this occurred."

"In the end, sadly, a tragic decision was made by Mica that ended her life," he added.

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Macbeth — Macbeth: A Tragic Hero Analysis

Macbeth: a Tragic Hero Analysis

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Published: Mar 16, 2024

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The definition of a tragic hero, macbeth’s tragic flaw: ambition, the influence of the supernatural, moral decline and guilt, the tragic end.

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Purple Papers | Passion project turned reality

Students help dementia patients.

DELBARTON, W.Va. (WSAZ) - We have a follow-up to 53 Days , the WSAZ Investigation into the disappearance and tragic end for Chuck Carroll.

In January 2022, we first told viewers about Chuck, a man with dementia who was taken to the hospital but was able to walk away and die.

His body was found weeks later -- just blocks from the hospital.

During Chuck’s disappearance and after his death, we took a closer look at all that went wrong in our documentary called 53 Days.

Little did we know that documentary would strike a chord with a classroom full of future health care workers. Students were determined to make a change, and their ideas are now becoming reality in multiple states.

“We have wanted this for so long. To actually see it come full circle, it’s crazy,” said Daylee Ellis, a Mingo Central High School senior.

Across the country, high school seniors are wrapping up those final days in the classroom -- looking forward to receiving that diploma.

But Ellis said a paper she’s been dreaming of is a little different. It has a purple hue, and it won’t be handed out at a ceremony.

These purple papers will be making their way through health care facilities in her community. Call it a passion project turned reality -- just in time for graduation.

It’s one Ellis believes will keep those who suffer from dementia a little safer -- the purple color alerting those who provide care to a patient’s cognitive issues.

The idea for the purple papers started in a classroom this year after Health Sciences teacher Andrea Clark gave her students an assignment -- to watch our documentary 53 Days.

It, of course, is Chuck Carroll’s story. He was taken to a hospital in Huntington for fever and vomiting but was able to walk away -- and die.

Chuck’s body was found 53 days later -- just blocks from the hospital.

Teacher Andrea Clark said she learned about Chuck’s story - from her cousin Nikki Hatfield.

“I opened the article, and I went out to watch the WSAZ, that you had done Chuck’s story. After i saw it, I went immediately and showed her the whole thing,” Hatfield said.

She works in health care in Tennessee where she’s also a student -- ultimately hoping to become a pharmacist.

WSAZ’s Sarah Sager asked her, “Did you ever dream that, you know, showing Andrea would create what’s happened now with how far things have come and well you’ve all been working on?”

Hatfield: “I really did not. I knew that it was going to hit close for her as it did for me. I never imagined that the students would take it as far as they had. but the fact that they have has opened so many doors for future health care workers for future nurses, anyone coming in or out of that program. and hopefully one day after speaking with Andrea, there is hope that this will grow to reach further regions of the country.”

And it has. The Mingo Central students have officially rolled out the purple papers at two skilled nursing facilities.

While Hatfield, as a part of a project toward her Masters degree, has helped to distribute purple alert forms in Sevierville, Tennessee.

“I sat down with all the medical assistants in a large group. I did a presentation for all of them and kind of just explained things, brought up some interesting points, showed them the clips from chuck’s story, 53 Days, and really explained to them how important it was to me that we get started here,” she said.

Hatfield told Sager that, during a six-week period, more than 3,100 patients were seen and about 15 percent filled out a purple alert form.

But the students and Hatfield believe the papers could go even further.

Sager : Where would you like to see this go ultimately?

Hatfield: I think that it is just important as the pink DNR papers. Of course every hospital has those. I feel the purple papers have the same importance when it comes to ranking things, especially in hospital settings, I think it is necessary.

“I really hope that it becomes not just statewide but like a nationwide thing,” Daylee Ellis said.

Statewide and nationwide are not outside the realm of possibilities.

“I actually spoke with your instructor about going to the American Health Care Association and seeing if they can get it pushed throughout of the state because it’s something that’s definitely needed in nursing care, hospitals, nursing homes and day cares. It’s very lacking in our communities.”

While these students hope to reach and help others with their purple papers, they say they’ll never forget where it all began.

“We’ve worked really hard to get these papers out and we’re trying to distribute them locally, so that we can make a change so that Chuck can make a change and so that his story can always be remembered throughout our community,” Ellis said.

Those seniors last day of high school is Friday, May 17, and graduation at Mingo Central High School is next Friday -- May 24.

In the meantime the juniors -- soon to be upcoming seniors -- will continue working on this project.

Copyright 2024 WSAZ. All rights reserved.

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A Palestinian converted to Judaism. An Israeli soldier saw him as a threat and opened fire

At first, it seemed like the kind of shooting that has become all too common in the Israeli-occupied West Bank

JERUSALEM — At first, it seemed like the kind of shooting that has become all too common in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. A Palestinian aroused suspicions and an Israeli soldier killed him.

But then the deceased was identified as David Ben-Avraham, a Palestinian who had made the almost unheard-of decision to convert from Islam to Judaism years earlier.

His unusual journey had taken him across some of the deepest fault lines in the Middle East and led to some unlikely friendships. Most Palestinians saw him as an eccentric outcast, while many Israelis treated him as an unwelcome convert to a religion that doesn’t proselytize.

But in his final moments, he was once again viewed as a Palestinian who was in the wrong place, at a time of widespread anger and suspicion.

A DIVIDED CITY

He was born Sameh Zeitoun in Hebron, home to some 200,000 Palestinians as well as hundreds of Jewish settlers who live in enclaves guarded by Israeli troops. Tensions have run high for decades, often spilling over into violence.

Rights groups have long accused Hebron’s settlers of harassing Palestinian residents, and Palestinians have committed a number of stabbing and shooting attacks against Israelis over the years.

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At its most extreme, the bitter neighbors live just a few meters apart. In some narrow alleys of Hebron’s Old City, metal netting protects Palestinian shoppers from objects thrown by settlers living on the upper floors.

Zeitoun first made contact with Jewish settlers over a decade ago, asking for help converting to Judaism, according to Noam Arnon, a Jewish settler in Hebron who went on to befriend him.

He said Zeitoun was inspired by family stories about his grandfather protecting Jews when riots erupted in 1929, when the Holy Land was under British colonial rule. Palestinians killed dozens of Jewish residents in the city.

“He went further, not only to live as a good neighbor but to join the Jewish community,” Arnon recounted.

A RARE CONVERSION

Conversion to other faiths is deeply frowned upon in Islam. In much of the Muslim world, those who do so are cast out of their communities, sometimes violently. Judaism, unlike Islam and Christianity, has no tradition of proselytization.

Such a conversion is even more fraught in Israel and the Palestinian territories, where religion and nationality usually overlap in a decades-old conflict. Judaism is the faith of most of the soldiers who patrol the territory and the settlers whom Palestinians see as hostile colonizers.

Arnon said most of the settlers from Hebron’s tight-knit community refused to accept Ben-Avraham. Only Arnon and a few others interacted with him, helping with his conversion application papers.

Religious conversions are rare but legal in areas administered by the semi-autonomous Palestinian Authority. Most are undertaken by Palestinian Christians converting to Islam for marriage.

In Israel, converting to Judaism requires an application to the government-run Conversion Authority. Ben-Avraham submitted two requests in 2018 but did not meet the requirements, according to a government official who was not authorized to speak with media and spoke on condition of anonymity.

With that pathway closed, Ben Avraham turned to Israel’s insular ultra-Orthodox community and eventually made his conversion official in 2020, according to documents published online.

In the year before his conversion, Ben-Avraham was detained by the Palestinian Authority’s intelligence unit in Hebron, according to Arnon and a local Palestinian activist, Issa Amro.

The reason for his arrest was never publicly disclosed, but they believe his conversion and open connections with Israelis attracted unwanted attention.

Palestinians can face arrest or even death if they’re seen as collaborating with Israeli authorities. But few would have suspected Ben-Avraham of being an informant because his story was widely known.

Ben-Avraham told the Israeli news site Times of Israel that he was held for two months in solitary confinement and beaten before being released. Around that time, a video emerged showing him holding what appears to be a Quran and pledging his Muslim faith.

Arnon and Amro said his statement was likely made under duress during detention. The PA’s prosecution office said it had no information about his case.

After his release, Ben-Avraham moved in with Haim Parag, a Jewish friend who lived in Jerusalem. He returned to Hebron infrequently because of safety concerns and continued his Jewish studies. Parag said the pair regularly prayed together at a nearby synagogue.

“He was like a son to me,” he said.

Parag also said he met Ben-Avraham’s wife and some of his children, and that several close family members maintained a relationship with him even after his conversion.

The Zeitoun family declined to speak with The Associated Press, fearing reprisal. In the end, Ben-Avraham left little public record of what drove his personal convictions.

A DEADLY SHOOTING

Ben-Avraham was waiting outside a West Bank settlement for an Israeli bus to take him to Parag’s apartment March 19 when he got into an argument in Hebrew with an Israeli soldier.

Across the West Bank, Jewish settlers live apart from Palestinians in guarded settlements where they’re subject to different laws. Palestinians are generally barred from entering settlements unless they have work permits.

“Are you Jewish?” the soldier shouts in a video that circulated online and appears to have been shot by his body camera.

“Of course,” Ben Avraham answers.

“What’s your name?” the soldier says.

“David.” he replies.

“David?” the soldier says.

“Ben-Avraham, stupid.”

The soldier then orders Ben-Avraham to step away from his bag on the ground and raise his hands in the air, before saying sarcastically, “Jewish.”

A second video, apparently taken from a nearby security camera, appears to show two soldiers shooting Ben-Avraham from a close distance as he keels over backward onto the sidewalk.

The army said a small knife was found in Ben Avraham’s bag after the shooting. Parag said he gave him the knife for self-defense.

The Israeli army said it’s investigating the shooting, but rights groups say soldiers are rarely held accountable in such situations.

Israeli forces have been on high alert as the West Bank has seen a surge of violence linked to the war in Gaza . Nearly 500 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire since the war’s start, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Many have been shot dead in armed clashes during military raids, others for throwing stones at troops, and some who were posing no apparent threat.

Palestinians have also carried out several stabbing and other attacks against Israelis.

Arnon said the shooting was a tragic misunderstanding. Parag, Ben-Avraham’s friend in Jerusalem, accused the soldiers of racial profiling, saying they saw Ben-Avraham for his background and not his unexpected beliefs.

Even in death, Ben-Avraham’s identity was contested.

Parag and another Israeli friend asked an Israeli court for the body to buried him at a Jewish cemetery, filing a petition against members of the Zeitoun family who wanted a Muslim funeral. Bezalel Hochman, a lawyer representing the two Israelis, said the Tel Aviv family court ruled in their favor.

After his death caused a public outcry, the Interior Ministry granted him Israeli residency, saying it wanted “to fulfill the will and desire of the deceased to be part of the nation of Israel.”

Ben Avraham was buried in April in a Jewish cemetery on the foothills of Mount Gerizim, near the Palestinian city of Nablus, Parag said. The hilltop is sacred for Samaritans — a small, ancient religious minority that straddles the Palestinian-Israeli divide, just like Ben-Avraham.

No one from the Zeitoun family attended the funeral, said Parag, who’s designing his friend’s gravestone.

He said it will read: “David Ben-Avraham Zeitoun Parag. The Holy Jew.”

Associated Press writer Tia Goldenberg in Jerusalem contributed to this report.