Webster’s Dictionary defines a hero as a person who is admired for great or brave acts. A villain is defined as a person who does bad things. According to these definitions, many classic characters, would be both a hero and a villain, but is that really possible?
The tragic hero is a longstanding literary concept. A tragic hero is a character with a fatal flaw, such as pride or ignorance, who is doomed to despite their best efforts or good intentions. This fatal flaw can sometimes portray our hero in a more villainous light, allowing the character to become both the hero and the villain of the story. Aristotle suggests in his Poetics that a hero of a tragedy must evoke in the audience a sense of pity or fear, saying, “the change of fortune presented must not be the spectacle of a virtuous man…show more content… It is clear that he constantly struggles to keep up with good deeds for his family. Though Troy Maxson definitely wouldn't win any awards for congeniality, he's still widely considered to be one of the greatest characters of the American stage. Troy's last name, Maxson, is a mixture of Mason and Dixon. This is after the Mason-Dixon line, the name for the imaginary line that separated the slave states from the free states. Troy's name portrays Troy's character as one who lives on a line between two contrasting ideas. His history is equal parts southern and northern, so he is half-full of hope and half-filled with disappointment. Like most tragic heroes, Troy does whatever he thinks is right. He used be able to knock a baseball out of the park like it was nothing, but he constantly strikes out in his personal life. Even though the people around him warn him that the things he's doing may have tragic consequences, he stubbornly pursues his own course of action. These major flaws ignorance, hypocrisy, jealousy, ultimately lead to his lonely and tragic