Tragedies

What is the saddest, most sorrowful, weeping-and-gnashing-of-teeth, most tragic tragedy that you know?

Don Quixote vs the Knight of the White Moon

Don Quixote is a novel

And it was a tragedy

King Lear

The bible and your diary.

Your mom's prostitution career.

Your life.

The Catcher in the Rye

thiiiissss

Good submission

>neo-Veeky Forums literally does not know what a tragedy is
Jesus Christ

No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out—
And take upon ’s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies. And we’ll wear out
In a walled prison packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon.

Antigone

A farewell to arms

Not a tragedy

The Death of Boromir in the Fellowship of the Ring

MacBeth. Romeo and Juliet. The star wars prequels.

Macbeth was actually a comedy desu
Romeo and Juliet is certainly a classic, though it didn't really touch me emotionally like others do
Star Wars is not a tragedy.

Not a tragedy

Just stop posting, retard

How is MacBeth a comedy? (I know the comedy isn't literally lulz) but MacBeth is a tragic hero in my eyes. He was a great Thane and warrior led astray to his doom by thots, witches, and ego.

I was mostly fooling with the prequels reference but there's an argument to be made that Anakin, too fits the tragic hero archetype, but he does live and has redemption ultimately so probably better fits as an epic.

Hamlet is the other Shakespeare tragedy.

I'm really struggling to think of more modern tragedies. I think a lot of the themes of tragedies were absorbed by other genres so there aren't many pure examples.

>tragic tragedy
>sad, sorrowful, weeping

You're actually such a plebeian that you perceive the aim of tragedy as portraying misery? Has there ever been a point in your life when you experienced the freedom and glory of tragic emotion?

This is sad, I know.

I agree with him and think you're retarded.

>implying Macduff wasn't the hero

>you perceive the aim of tragedy as portraying misery?
Not necessarily, which is why I added those adjectives in order to specify.
If I was just looking for tragedies in general, I could pull up a list.

Dollhouse ?

The Bacchai, or whatever it is called in English. Very subjective because before I read it I had a juvenile and edgy "Dionysos is so kewl lol party hard" view

My diary

Cyrano De Bergerac

the last temptations of christ.

Catharina von Georgien

>Macbeth was actually a comedy
>implying comedy and tragedy don't mean the same thing

You could have asked anyone who lived through it and 9/10 would say the Romanov family execution. Communists are heartless bastards.

Agamemnons death.

>9/10 don't know what a tragedy is
I thought Russia was Veeky Forums

Enlighten us, o superior Autismo!

The Metamorphosis by Kafka

A tragedy is a tragic event

>this is what kids these days actually believe

Not a tragedy

Dictionary proves me right

"an event causing great suffering, destruction, and distress, such as a serious accident, crime, or natural catastrophe."

The bombing of innocents at Dresden.

The Armenian Genocide.

You really should have posted this on Veeky Forums though.

You fucking cretins

Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Basically the peak of human evil

Very funny, guys

>The Innocents
>Literally cogs in the war machine
What about the innocents at Guernica?

I'm inclined to say Troilus and Cressida, but if it's you OP, who has been going "nu-uh, not a tragedy" to most posters, you're probably going to disagree with me.

Troilus and Cressida subverts the very foundation of tragedy - it presents apparent heroism and love, but subverts them, shows them to be hollow and insignificant. The fact that the love story parallels Romeo and Juliet in a number of ways just makes it more forceful in this regard.

It's preeminently prophetic in terms of the horrors of modernity, something Shakespeare sensed and worked with in many of his plays, Hamlet particularly. There's no catharsis, no sorrow, just emptiness. There is no fate, no grand scheme, no underlying cosmic order or telos that you suffer from and for. It's pointless, and that is in some ways a deeper tragedy - but only, and I really do stress ONLY, when executed masterfully, and that is very rare. Edgy works of art about pointless suffering are a dime a dozen, but Troilus and Cressida manages to pull off the perfect veneer of a traditional tragedy, only to completely subvert your expectations and leave you feeling this dull ache of emptiness.

The only similar experience I've had was with the Book of Disquiet.


>I'm really struggling to think of more modern tragedies

Tragedy doesn't work in modernity. Tragedy presupposes a degree of fatal determination that we simply do not believe in any more. If you're interested in it, Kierkegaard wrote a brilliant essay on it in the first part of Either/Or. And if you're really interested in it, try reading Shakespeare through the lens of Kierkegaards views on tragedy presented therein - he is a model case in many ways, and there is not a single shred of doubt that Kierkegaard was massively influenced by his readings of Shakespeare.

I actually agree that that's a good one.
I also don't think I'm being overly pedantic. A tragedy is a form of play, that much you should at least be able to get right if you're on this board. I'm not even insisting on classical tragedy, bourgeois tragedy and so on is also welcome.

La Fortune des Rougons, especially because of the 19 other books that followed.

Non-white immigration.

The death of Hector. Fuck Achilles.

Capitalism

You mean "fuck Athena"

Othello

Coz poor Desdemona!

Forget time machines, I want a machine to get into Othello and save Desdemona.

Don't worry, Desdemona, I will save you!


Something Happened by Joseph Heller is pretty tragic.

You have no credibility once you got 3+ posts without providing your own definition.

A tragedy occurs when a character must die and he knows he must die.

Having to look at and be around disgusting, overweight, brown "people" if you want to go anywhere in America.

Christ, do kids seriously not learn this stuff at school anymore? Look it up on Wikipedia.

>Tragedy(from theGreek:τραγῳδία,tragōidia[a]) is a form ofdramabased on humansuffering that invokes an accompanyingcatharsisor pleasure in audiences.[2][3]While manycultures have developed forms that provoke thisparadoxicalresponse, the termtragedyoften refers to a specifictraditionof drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition ofWestern civilisation.[2][4]That tradition has been multiple and discontinuous, yet the term has often been used to invoke a powerful effect ofcultural identity and historical continuity—"theGreeksand theElizabethans, in one cultural form;HellenesandChristians, in a common activity," asRaymond Williamsputs it.[5]
and so on and so on

>messed up paste
Whatever, you get the point

please go back.

I can't stand the intense mediocrity that radiates off these pathetic bodies.

Birth control. Worst mistake in the last century.

the fact that the holocaust didn't happen

>Look it up on Wikipedia

>doesn't have highschool-level education
>looks down on Wikipedia

I have a high school education and I look down on Wikipedia because literally anyone with an email address can edit articles.

...

Europe since 1942

Seven against Thebes. Even more when you see it as the end of the story of Oedipus.

Those tokyo ghoul novels.
Very sad. Mh'm.

the notebook

You do realize that by that definition you allow all of those suggestions as tragedies right?

>freedom and glory of tragic emotion

Could you elaborate more on this?

The majority of posters ITT do not know what a tragedy is.

Veeky Forums is supposedly a literature board? Someone should screencap this disgraceful thread, it is the undisputable proof that nobody on Veeky Forums actually reads. Thank you for motivating me to finally get rid of the poisonous habit of wasting my time in this cesspit. Good riddance, imbeciles.

Majnun and Leyli, of which there are about a dozen variations, but Nizāmi Ganjāvi wrote the best one.

As novels go, The Possibility of an Island.

what a wonderfully strange post

The last letter of Queen Marie Antoinette.

Your existence.

my diary desu :(

The Death of Ivan Ilyich

>neo-Veeky Forums does not know what a tragedy is

Well that's sad. You could say that's... a tragedy

>thread about tragedy
>exactly one (1) post out of seventy-five (75) that rises above extremely low-effort
>OP clearly made the thread because he is a wikipedia-jockey who wanted to feel superior after reading a cursory definition of tragedy
>some 90% of the posts are a namedrop without any thought behind it presented

Why is this? Is it because Veeky Forums users don't actually want to talk about literature, but merely like the thought of being well-versed in it and well-read? How does such an attitude make sense on a board characterized by anonymity and impermanence? Is it because anons are afraid to speak up, due to the harsh environment, exemplified in a stellar manner by OP, but pervasive on the entire board, of being hateful, spiteful and calling people plebs for holding any opinion which differs from one's own without providing justification for the contempt? Is it because Veeky Forums has just got caught up in a cycle of low-effort, thoughtless shitposts breeding low-effort, thoughtless hate, and no one is bothered to even try anymore?

As for your question OP, I think this thread is a good example of tragedy, as a synechdoche of Veeky Forums in general. We have a forum for the discussion of literature, marked by anonymity and impermanence, which should be more than enough to voice any opinion, without fear of being ostracized for being a plebeian or an idiot. But we don't use it. Even worse, our use of the board allows us to nourish the delusion of being well-read and literary, despite obviously being incapable of stringing together even three sentences on why we like something, why we consider it eminent tragedy. It's low-effort automatic behavior through and through, cranking out some contextually not too outrageous claim to what is a good tragedy in order to fulfill the function of the board, which is evidently to allow anons to feel as if they're patrician for spouting the right opinions, but anonymously, without any commitment, commitment to following up or presenting one's reasoning, something which would instantly dispel the delusion of literary erudition. It's an automated and self-perpetuating resentment machine, completely anodyne in it's underlying consensus, the only "challenges" presented between anons being unsubstantiated shit-flinging and name-calling, which is always low-effort, and never a real challenge.

And for some reason, we're here forever. That's tragedy.

books where the dog dies

So can all of you get of your high horse and explain to me the meaning of this:
>freedom and glory of tragic emotion

from this post How can there be freedom and glory in tragic emotion?

Your analysis is way off. People here *are* well read (some of them anyways) and discourse does happen here, if you're feeling like people just want to show off how well read they are, perhaps that's you realizing that you haven't read very much, so you assume that everyone else is on your level. There are several examples of great tragedies in this thread. Something you'll over look because Ironically, your post is just to prove how patrician and well read you are. Decrying the posting of other anons while not having an example of a good tragedy yourself. It adds nothing to the discussion, except make you look exactly like the type of poster that you're criticizing.

A lot of tragedies are about the death of not only the character, but everything false that they used to know, on your death bed, realizing how wrong you were about everything, and realizing the 'true nature' of things is very freeing, to then accept death is very glorious. just some thoughts.

I was literally in the mood for some moving plays (tragedies, specifically) and wanted recommendations. I neither expected nor wanted this.

He's is probably making an opaque reference to Nietzsche who claimed that life can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon, and that tragedy allows us to affirm our will to live in the face of cosmically ordained suffering and an inherently cruel world.

Either that or it's Aristotle, who found catharsis in tragedy, but the choice of words ("glory", especially) suggests it's Nietzsche.

I wouldn't expect a follow-up from the guy, but if you're interested, read The Poetics by Aristotle (fair warning though, it is excruciatingly autistic) and the Birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche.

Anything else you can recommend? Paradox of tragic pleasure was always interesting to me.

>invokes "takes-one-to-know-one" in his critique of the analysis

That you spent four lines doing it doesn't make it any less low-effort, unreflected or thoughtless.

>There are several examples of great tragedies in this thread.

Never claimed there wasn't, you're missing the point. The point is that there is no reflection involved whatsoever. It's automaton behavior.

>Decrying the posting of other anons while not having an example of a good tragedy yourself. It adds nothing to the discussion, except make you look exactly like the type of poster that you're criticizing.

I did post in this thread previously with an example. Your super-basic fallback to "projection!" and the notion that you actually think there is any "discussion" (where? where is there anything but unreflected namedropping?) in this thread enforces my view about the general state of this board. It's thoughtless and devoid of reflection.

Et tu?

If you'd like a take on tragedy that juxtaposes it with modernity, I cannot recommend the Kierkegaard essay that was mentioned earlier in the thread enough. "Ancient Tragical Motif as Reflected in the Modern" is one of many translations of the title, but it's in the first part of Either/Or. It's an excellent starting point for the philosophical significance of tragedy, and opens a lot of avenues for further thought.

>Tragedy doesn't work in modernity because it presupposes fatal determination

On that note with neuroscience and some philosophers suggesting a much more limited control over our reactions to our environment than suggested by Western thinkers since Locke's tabula rasa premise is it possible the genre makes a comeback? A real exploration of crime and punishment in America that has a heroic protagonist locked into his own doom by a fatalistic combination of modern fate known as genes and the environment he's born into?