Week 10: "Understanding Tragedy"11/10/2017 Throughout these past few weeks, we have been focusing on the concept of tragedy. When we were beginning this unit, I had an unsure idea of what tragedy was. I figured it had something to do with sad topic and some kind of suffering - which turned out to be true. However, I have since learned that there is much more to tragedy than what I had originally anticipated. Tragedy, in literature, has dealt with human suffering for hundreds of years. Often, there is some kind of tragic flaw that the main character possesses, although they may not necessarily realize it. In regards to tragedy, when we read Oedipus aloud in class, I learned that we may not always understand a character's tragic flaw until the end of a story. Oedipus and his mother had tried their whole lives to avoid letting fate cause him to kill his father and wed his mother. However, they ultimately couldn't avoid the fate that was set out for them. Moreover, I have learned that tragedy does not always have to be a plot twist or a shocking factor in the plot of a story - tragedy exists in everyday life as well. When we watched Dan Ariely's Ted Talk in class, he explained that the human mind has a tragic flaw, which is that it is prone to be duped by options we are given in all aspects of life. We believe that just because we can invent amazing objects and revolutionize technology, that we have minds that can beat all odds. However, whilst listening to Ariely's speech, I realized that this isn't true. Our minds can't cognitively understand that certain options create influences on nearly every decision we make, because those options present consequences that our minds can't pick up. Before having watched this Ted Talk, I would have continued to believe that tragedy only exists in dramatic cases.
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