Throughout history, stories, no matter how they were told or in what form they were presented, have had complex characters. The most frequent commonality to appear amongst stories, regardless of genre or era, is the inclusion of the tragic hero as an elemental character. The similarities don’t end there though. As seen in the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, the novel The Trial by Franz Kafka, the TV show Alias written by J.J. Abrams, and the excerpt from Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, it is also common for the tragic hero to specifically possess the tragic flaw of an uninhibited and vehement belief - though it is often disguised as something else.
All the works established above include examples of tragic heroes who seemingly possess one tragic flaw, but whose fervent beliefs end up being what truly lead to their unfortunate final circumstances. Each work’s tragic hero can be characterized by one overpowering and dominant trait that disguises the fervent belief that is his true tragic flaw. To begin, Oedipus or “the land’s avenger by all rights, and Apollo’s champion too” from Oedipus Rex, is characterized by arrogance, yet it isn’t his arrogance that leads to his ultimate downfall. After knowing “the slander spread” and hearing that he was “fated to couple with [his mother],” Oedipus “ran [and] abandoned Corinth” in an attempt to escape his fate. He also relentlessly pursued the truth about King Laius’s murder. Evidently, it was his unyielding belief in the good and power of human will that ushered him towards his self-inflicted blindness and loss of the throne rather than his arrogance. Similarly, in The Trial and Alias, Josef K.’s and Arvin Sloane’s overall characterizations serve as the disguises for their true tragic flaws. While K. can be primarily characterized as stubborn, like Oedipus, he also relentlessly pursues a truth - why he was deemed a guilty man. Since there is no apparent reason or valid explanation, he defiantly and consistently refuses to “accept [the accusation that he is guilty] as true,” despite people constantly telling him that he must accept the accusations against him or his situation will have “far worse consequences.” His stubbornness only enhances his real flaw - his absolute belief in his innocence and worthiness of just treatment. That belief leads to his refusal of acceptance, and its inevitable side effect of uncooperativeness with the law, which is the predominant and underlying reason for his arrest and execution. The last fictional tragic hero is Sloane, the tragic hero from the early 2000s TV show, Alias. Throughout the show, Sloane’s perception switches back and forth from villain to ally, yet no matter how he is perceived, his intentions are never pure - he always has a hidden agenda. In fact, the majority of the time, most of the characters perceive him as a threat due to that dominant trait and tragic-flaw disguise that can only be described as greediness and selfishness. Sticking to the pattern though, it is not his greediness and/or selfishness that defeats him, but rather his vehement belief in the prophecies of an ancient prophet named Rambaldi. Being “a follower of Rambaldi,” the prophecies are essentially his religion. He ceases at nothing to collect artifacts Rambaldi left behind in order to access and execute his “master plan,” which as it turns out, is catalyzing the end of the world. His belief that Rambaldi’s predictions were reality’s destiny and he was the one “chosen” to fulfill them is what leads to his literal downfall into an immortality serum, later causing his eternal entrapment under a pile of cave rocks. Clearly, a character’s level of complexity greatly increases when their hamartia is disguised as a dominant character trait.
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Arvin Sloane
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Arvin Sloane in front of the final Rambaldi artifact.
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In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera ties all these findings together with a real-life example of tragic heroes who tricked the world into believing their dominant trait was their motive when in reality, it was their tragic flaw. Most people are familiar with the communist regimes, and the communist leaders are the group whom Kundera refers to in his novel. Certainly no average person would ever consider the communist leaders who have murdered and tormented countless individuals to be heroic (even tragically heroic), but as Kundera explains, the leaders themselves do. For all the years the communist movement gained traction, it produced horrendous fear in the world’s general public as they quickly became appalled by its seemingly pure evil and ill-hearted leaders emerging to govern the world. It wasn’t until much later that the public realized the leaders legitimately saw nothing wrong with their actions. These “enthusiasts,” as Kundera calls them, genuinely believed and were entirely “convinced [that] they had discovered the road to paradise.” They believed in their cause and their governing style so strongly that they thought they were “forced to execute many people.” Communism continues to remain in effect, and although it unfortunately hasn’t met its downfall yet, it demonstrates how misleading personalities and actions can be when personal beliefs are involved in the pursuit of determining motive or hamartia. The interconnectedness of all those examples and the frequency with which tragic heroes’ fervent beliefs become strong enough to cause their deterioration and ultimately their downfalls, proves the occurrence is more than coincidental. Oedipus was literally blind as well as blind to the signs pointing to the strength of his fate. Sloane and K. were blind to their catastrophic errors in judgment and their susceptibility to their beliefs’ control and power over them. The public was blind to the communists’ true justifications. Thus, whether or not these people were also victims of fate or some type of injustice is irrelevant. They were all victims of fervent beliefs never recognized in time to save them from personal disaster. In that way, they collectively demonstrate how passion can be gradually corrupted until it amounts to failure and proves itself to be a force never to be reckoned with.
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