Ariely’s argument is that we are significantly less in control of our own decisions than we think we are. The way that questions and choices are presented to us has a large influence on what decisions we will make. Although the ted talk never explicitly mentioned tragedy as a genre, it still ties into the genre and especially with Oedipus Rex because he tried very hard to avoid killing his father and sleeping with his mother (yup that’s a big yikes to write), but when he thought he was in control of his decisions he still ended up doing both of those things despite all of his efforts. Sometimes a tragic flaw isn’t even a personality trait or any fault of your own, sometimes the tragic flaw is simply being human and having little control over your fate. That is exactly what Ariely’s argument is. This expanded my views of tragedy because I never thought of tragedy and specifically tragic flaws in this way. I don’t know if it really counts as a weakness because everyone is human, so it’s not unique. For this reason I feel like in tragedy the main character might not always have a tragic flaw, but more broadly has something intangible that they have to struggle against.
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When I think about tragedy, I immediately think of Romeo and Juliet. Tragedy is a genre of literature where things go wrong and it's very dramatic and often there is a star-crossed lovers storyline that ends badly. There is usually death in tragedy as well. Those are pretty much all my thoughts surrounding tragedy. I don't usually read it unless it's for an english class, which is probably why I only have a vague concept of what tragedy actually is. I'm too much of an optimistic happy-go-lucky kind of person for that kind of down in the dumps sad sappy stuff, right? So what is tragedy actually? I looked it up on wikipedia and found out that tragedy is "a form of drama based on human suffering." Sounds fun! So I was right about the drama part, and 'human suffering' sounds like a more scholarly way of saying things go wrong. So now I feel a little better about my knowledge of tragedy, my vague ideas were mostly correct! |
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