Abstract:
One very common view of tragedy – often arising from a (mis)reading of Aristotle – is as that which ends in sadness, for which it produces the correct tragic effect on the reader. The implication of this is that the tragic text is identified and is so classified by an unstable feature that is itself outside the text, namely, the feeling of the audience. But the literary text as a self-contained universe proves to depend on nothing external to it for its validity. The tragic myth in particular, as it is represented in literature, is not an effect to be seen at the end; it is inscribed in the text, in the nature of its struggles that determine the very structure of the text. It will hardly be accounted for by the matter of sad feelings, for the saddest point in the text is often surrounded by a comic possibility. This forms the burden of this paper. The intention is to examine Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God and through a close reading of the text, demonstrate that rather than wear tragedy as a dress, its very being is tragic; and that at each point of serious crisis, there is a comic threat.
