"The Tragic Fallacy"

Oftentimes, we think of tragedy and nobility in the same idea. The fact is that we usually cannot have one without the other, and that is what makes the tragic story so powerful. If Romeo and Juliet were awful people, we wouldn't be heartbroken when they both die. However, since they are noble and kind souls, we are torn apart with their deaths. To make a tragedy, well, tragic, one must have a character of nobility, so that one can be attached to the character and be upset when something bad happens to them. Even if the person is not perfect, we still look at them with noble intentions, just to create a more powerful reaction. We have to believe in the greatness and importance of man to be affected by tragedy, or else it is just another story with a sad ending. Tragedies do not have the traditional "happy" ending that other stories have. It's not the type of deal where everyone goes home happy and lives happily ever after. Joseph Krutch wrote, "Tragedy, the greatest and the most difficult of the arts, can adopt none of these methods; and yet it must reach its own happy end in its own way. Though its conclusion must be, by its premise, outwardly calamitous, though it must speak to those who know that the good man is cut off and that the fairest things are the first to perish, yet it must leave them, as Othello does, content that this is so." He is trying to explain that even though these are "sad" endings, they are happy in their own way. Many times they will show light in human kind, or show the power of love. It will allow the character to live long enough to learn from their mistakes, or they will die early leaving the audience to live with the truth that our protagonist didn't live long enough to see. Tragedies give faith back to human kind.