To be Determined Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 1

To be Determined - Essay Example He is essentially good, but he, or his ancestors, have broken a moral law – a law of the gods or the state. In the play we see him struggling to avoid the consequences of his transgression but we know that his eventual defeat is inevitable that he cannot avoid the punishment that will come as a consequence of what he has done. Dante’s Inferno and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have their own protagonists and tragic heroes. Some tragedies like the problem plays of Dante and Homer may not end in death but there is a sense of sadness or melancholy or perhaps of futility in the fact that life for the tragic character must go on. If the hero does not die, but those whom he loves or values are destroyed, we still find ourselves with the same kind of emotion which his death would give us. Although literature, Homer’s and Dante’s, leaves us with a sense of loss and tragedy because the hero has shown us how noble and good he is and yet has been destroyed or defeated, we feel a certain kind of satisfaction because he has demonstrated the value of human nature and has shown us how noble and great man can be. We feel proud of such a man as a tragic hero and we feel humbled by the thought that we may not be able to be as heroic as he was. Dante’s Divina Comedia (Divine Comedy) ns become a best seller. Why is this? It may be because most thinking people today are profoundly disturbed by the erosion of values in our mechanistic civilization, and are floundering around in search of the eternal verities of beauty and truth as a stabilizing force in their lives. Dante â€Å"has framed all the parts of his enormous perception within a total relationship of values and within a total dramatization of reality†. (Mazzotta, 128) By the power of his personal genius and by the power of his metaphoric language we can translate his particular