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The words "tragedy" and "tragic" have frequently been applied to Orson Welles's film Citizen Kane and its protagonist Charles Foster Kane. Peter Cowie calls the film "a portrait of an incredibly powerful personality," a study of "the life of a grandiose figure ending in tragedy."' Joseph McBride asserts that "Kane's life as we see it follows the scheme of classical tragedy. . . ."2 David Bordwell, although admitting that the film is also a "pointed comedy of manners," describes Citizen Kane as "a tragedy on Marlovian lines, the story of the rise and fall of an overreacher. . . ."3 Although he doesn't use the term "tragic hero," James Naremore agrees with BordweH's characterization of Kane, whom he sees as typical of the sort of heroes Welles has portrayed in many of his films (which of course include adaptations of Othello and Macbeth): ". . . most of his films have been about tyrannical egotists, men who try to imitate God."4Yet none of these critics have attempted to discuss Citizen Kane systematically as a tragedy, and their view of the film has been disputed vigorously by Pauline Kael: "Kane is closer to comedy than tragedy. . . . What might be considered tragic in it has such a Daddy Warbucks quality that if it's tragic at all it's comic strip tragic."5 Even if Welles himself is attracted to tragic characters, Kael argues that the script of Kane, which she believes to have been written principally of Herman Mankiewicz, simply does not support a tragic conception: "[Mankiewicz] couldn't write the character as a tragic fallen hero, because he couldn't resist making him funny ."6
The purpose of this essay is to argue that Citizen Kane indeed deserves to be regarded as a tragedy; and is, moreover, by and large a quite orthodox tragedy possessing most of the significant features of tragedy cited by Aristotle in his Poetics. The fact that the film is often quite funny and we sometimes laugh at Kane's manifestations of pride instead of regarding them with awe or terror in no way detracts from the ultimate tragedy of the character's life. Kael apparently forgets how closely at times many classic tragedies border on comedy. The Sentry is not the only comic character...