Tragedy and the Common Man by Arthur Miller

In this age few tragedies are written. It has often 

been held that the lack is due to a paucity of 

heroes among us, or else that modern man has 

had the blood drawn out of his organs of belief by 

the skepticism of science, and the heroic attack on 

life cannot feed on an attitude of reserve and 

circumspection. For one reason or another, we are 

often held to be below tragedy-or tragedy above 

us. The inevitable conclusion is, of course, that the 

tragic mode is archaic, fit only for the very highly 

placed, the kings or the kingly, and where this 

admission is not made in so many words it is most 

often implied. 

I believe that the common man is as apt a subject 

for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were. On 

the face of it this ought to be obvious in the light 

of modern psychiatry, which bases its analysis 

upon classic formulations, such as the Oedipus and 

Orestes complexes, for instance, which were

enacted by royal beings, but which apply to 

everyone in similar emotional situations. 

More simply, when the question of tragedy in art in 

not at issue, we never hesitate to attribute to the 

well-placed and the exalted the very same mental 

processes as the lowly. And finally, if the exaltation 

of tragic action were truly a property of the high- 

bred character alone, it is inconceivable that the 

mass Of mankind should cherish tragedy above all 

other forms, let alone be capable of understanding 

it. 

As a general rule, to which there may be 

exceptions unknown to me, I think the tragic 

feeling is evoked in us when we are in the 

presence of a character who is ready to lay down 

his life, if need be, to secure one thing--his sense 

of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, 

Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggles that of 

the individual attempting to gain his "rightful" 

position in his society. 

Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from 

it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the 

first time, but the fateful wound from which the 

inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity, 

and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy,

then, is the consequence of a man's total 

compulsion to evaluate himself justly. 

In the sense of having been initiated by the hero 

himself, the tale always reveals what has been 

called his tragic flaw," a failing that is not peculiar 

to grand or elevated characters. Nor is it 

necessarily a weakness. The flaw, or crack in the 

character, is really nothing--and need be nothing, 

but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in 

the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to 

his dignity,his image of his rightful status. Only 

the passive, only those who accept their lot 

without active retaliation, are "flawless." Most of us 

are in that category. But there are among us 

today, as there always have been, those who act 

against the scheme of things that degrades them, 

and in the process of action everything we have 

accepted out of fear or insensitivity or ignorance is 

shaken before us and examined, and from this 

total onslaught by an individual against the 

seemingly stable cosmos surrounding us--from this 

total examination of the "unchangeable" 

environment--comes the terror and the fear that is 

classically associated with tragedy. 

More important, from this total questioning of what 

has previously been unquestioned, we learn. And 

such a process is not beyond the common man. In

revolutions around the world, these past thirty 

years, he has demonstrated again and again this 

inner dynamic of all tragedy. 

Insistence upon the rank of the tragic hero, or the 

so-called nobility of his character, is really but a 

clinging to the outward forms of tragedy. If rank or 

nobility of character was indispensable, then it 

would follow that the problems of those with rank 

were the particular problems of tragedy. But surely 

the right of one monarch to capture the domain 

from another no longer raises our passions, nor 

are our concepts of justice what they were to the 

mind of an Elizabethan king. 

The quality in such plays that does shake us, 

however, derives from the underlying fear of being 

displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away 

from our chosen image of what or who we are in 

this world. Among us today this fear is as strong, 

and perhaps stronger, than it ever was. In fact, it 

is the common man who knows this fear best. 

Now, if it is true that tragedy is the consequence of 

a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself 

justly, his destruction in the attempt posits a 

wrong or an evil in his environment. And this is 

precisely the morality of tragedy and its lesson. 

The discovery of the moral law, which is what the

enlightenment of tragedy consists of, is not the 

discovery of some abstract or metaphysical 

quantity. 

The tragic right is a condition of life, a condition in 

which the human personality is able to flower and 

realize itself. The wrong is the condition which 

suppresses man, perverts the flowing out of his 

love and creative instinct. Tragedy enlightens and 

it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the 

enemy of man's freedom. The thrust for freedom is 

the quality in tragedy which exalts. The 

revolutionary questioning of the stable 

environment is what terrifies. In no way is the 

common man debarred from such thoughts or such 

actions. 

Seen in this light, our lack of tragedy may be 

partially accounted for by the turn which modern 

literature has taken toward the purely psychiatric 

view of life, or the purely sociological. If all our 

miseries, our indignities, are born and bred within 

our minds, then all action, let alone the heroic 

action, is obviously impossible. 

And if society alone is responsible for the cramping 

of our lives, then the protagonist must needs be so 

pure and faultless as to force us to deny his 

validity as a character. From neither of these views

can tragedy derive, simply because neither 

represents a balanced concept of life. Above all 

else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by 

the writer of cause and effect. 

No tragedy can therefore come about when its 

author fears to question absolutely everything, 

when he regards any institution, habit or custom 

as being either everlasting, immutable or 

inevitable.In the tragic view the need of man to 

wholly realize himself is the only fixed star, and 

whatever it is that hedges his nature and lowers it 

is ripe for attack and examination. Which is not to 

say that tragedy must preach revolution. 

The Greeks could probe the very heavenly origin of 

their ways and return to confirm the rightness of 

laws. And Job could face God in anger, demanding 

his right and end in submission. But for a moment 

everything is in suspension, nothing is accepted, 

and in this stretching and tearing apart of the 

cosmos, in the very action of so doing, the 

character gains "size," the tragic stature which is 

spuriously attached to the royal or the high born in 

our minds. The commonest of men may take on 

that stature to the extent of his willingness to 

throw all he has into the contest, the battle to 

secure his rightful place in his world.

There is a misconception of tragedy with which I 

have been struck in review after review, and in 

many conversations with writers and readers alike. 

It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied to 

pessimism. Even the dictionary says nothing more 

about the word than that it means a story with a 

sad or unhappy ending. This impression is so firmly 

fixed that I almost hesitate to claim that in truth 

tragedy implies more optimism in its author than 

does comedy, and that its final result ought to be 

the reinforcement of the onlooker's brightest 

opinions of the human animal. [see Joseph 

Campbell on comedy].JB 

For, if it is true to say that in essence the tragic 

hero is intent upon claiming his whole due as a 

personality, and if this struggle must be total and 

without reservation, then it automatically 

demonstrates the indestructible will of man to 

achieve his humanity. The possibility of victory 

must be there in tragedy. Where pathos rules, 

where pathos is finally derived, a character has 

fought a battle he could not possibly have won. 

The pathetic is achieved when the protagonist is, 

by virtue of his witlessness, his insensitivity or the 

very air he gives off, incapable of grappling with a 

much superior force. Pathos truly is the mode for 

the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance 

between what is possible and what is impossible.

And it is curious, although edifying, that the plays 

we revere, century after century, are the 

tragedies. In them, and in them alone, lies the 

belief--optimistic, if you will, in the perfectibility of 

man. It is time, I think, that we who are without 

kings, took up this bright thread of our history and 

followed it to the only place it can possible lead in 

our time--the heart and spirit of the average man. 

* Arthur Miller, "Tragedy and the Common Man," 

from The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (Viking 

Press, 1978) pp. 3-7. Copyright 1949, Copyright 0 

renewed 1977 by Arthur Miller. Reprint(by 

permission of Viking Penguin, Inc. All rights 

reserved. 

from Robert W. Corrigan. Tragedy: Vision and 

Form. 2nd ed. New York: Harper, 1981.