Content area
Abstract
This paper brings the tragedies of Thomas Hardy and those of Octavio de Faria together for a comparative study. In the Introduction we point to some aspects of their work which set them apart, explore the usage of bird imagery which is common to both novelists in their approach to tragic characters, examine the criticism written on their works, and present the central idea and the division of the paper per se.
We try to demonstrate, in the first part of the paper, how Hardy, much more effectively than de Faria, uses places, with their history, and time to achieve tragic effect in his novels. Hardy juxtaposes the transitoriness of a character's life to the ancient permanence of nature; de Faria, the "palpable" transitoriness of life on earth to the inscrutable mystery of eternal life.
The second part deals with the tragic hero and has two major sub-divisions. In the first sub-division we show how the tragic heroes of the 19th and 20th centuries are no longer prominent people in their society. They are usually outsiders but no less fascinating and complex than the ancient and the Shakespearean tragic heroes. The second sub-division goes into the inner nature of the tragic hero and shows that characters with tragic potential (1) who turn to the future with hopeful eyes cease to have tragic possibilities; (2) who are capable of detaching themselves from their suffering selves lose tragic resonance; (3) who succumb to external powers and live on in total oblivion of their selves are more pathetic than tragic; (4) who destroy themselves because they see death as the only way out of their distress diminish their tragic impact upon the reader; (5) who triumph--triumph through their inner lives--and project this feeling as they take their destiny into their own hands are the only characters who achieve full tragic stature.
The Conclusion sums up the ideas presented in the paper and is followed by Appendix 1, a short biographical note about Octavio de Faria, and by Appendix 2, synopses of the tragedies written by the Brazilian novelist and collected under the title of Tragedia Burguesa.
