21st Century Literature from the Philippines and Around the

World
WHAT I CAN DO
ACTIVITY 9: LET’S REFLECT

The Importance of Tragedy

Tragedy
is a specific
theatrical genre. Its
rules were first
and most famously

outlined by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in the Poetics, which was written
sometime around 330BC. In the Poetics, Aristotle outlines the features of a well written tragedy.
He mentions that tragedy has six component parts: plot, character, diction, reasoning,
spectacle and lyric poetry. The most important of these are plot and then character.

Plot is the most important part of tragedy. It is more important than character.
Tragedy, Aristotle says, is an imitation of life and of actions, not of people. Aristotle divides the
dramatic narrative into two parts, story and plot. Story is the raw material from which a plot is
made. Greek tragedies draw their plots from much longer Greek myths. As we have seen with
Medea, rather than telling the whole of Medea’s story, Euripides chooses only to tell the plot of
how Jason and Medea split up.

The plot is the smaller part of the larger story that the tragic playwright
decides to tell. When making a plot, Aristotle says, the playwright must select a set of
events from the larger story and organize them into a logical order, a unified action.

Same as how this pandemic taught us. People aren’t expecting this kind of tragedy
in our world. Countless lives are gone in a span of a year. This tragedy that occurred around
the world taught everyone that, with all the little things we do as an individual, are bigger when
we do it all as one. On the other hand, looking at the bright side of this tragedy is not that bad,
with all the lessons this pandemic gave in our mind. As a result, most people right now tend
to be more careful than they were ever before. After a long time staying in our homes, the
unity of our actions results to the regrowth of our economy. Despite all of the unnecessary events
that happened in our generation, we all know that there’s a sunshine waiting after the storm we
are experiencing. As we all cooperate to fight this tragedy, we could help on bringing back the
smiles that are lost. We heal as one.