The tragic hero is a something popularized in Greek tragedies. But what if the Greeks where not the first with this idea of the tragic hero? In the epic of Gilgamesh the main character Gilgamesh is in fact a tragic hero. He shares many characteristic with the Greek tragic hero and in fact he shares similarities with Creon from Antigone.
This concept of hubris is “excessive pride or self-confidence; arrogance.” According to dictionary.com. This is a major character flaw in both of these Hero’s. Creon said “You’ll never bury that body in the grave, not even if Zeus’s eagles rip the corpse and wing their rotten picking off to the throne of God!” This is such a prime example of hubris.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh’s pride is the thing that kills him. He is self-destructive and he really does not get it until the end. To me he is a prime example of what it means to be a tragic hero.
I want to argue that Gilgamesh is the first recorded tragic hero in literature. I will break down what it means to be a tragic hero, and compare these to the Greek tragic hero’s to Gilgamesh.
I like it! I know one source you'll probably want to use: Aristotle's "Poetics." This is the text in which he defines the features of tragedy and a tragic hero.
ReplyDeletehttp://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.mb.txt
One of the contrasts I think you might want to mention in the essay, though, is the fate of each character. Creon and Gilgamesh seem to end up very differently in the two stories. But at the same time their endings are similar because both seem to understand the world and their lives in new ways. So the changes that occur in both characters