Self-Realisation

• The hero in tragic texts is usually self-deceiving before the text culminates in a moment of discovery and realisation.
• Throughout tragic texts, the tragic hero tends to be self-deceiving.
• However, there comes the moment where these heroes undergo a moment of discovery, journeying from ignorance to knowledge.
• It is in these moments that, for some critics, characters truly attain tragic status.
• Willy has a moment of self-discovery near the end of Act Two during his final confrontation with Biff, finally seeing the love Biff still has for his father.
• However, this moment is all too brief and Willy is almost immediately swept up by his old fantasies of Biff’s golden future:

  • “That boy – that boy is going to be magnificent!”
• It is left to Biff to move from ignorance to self-knowledge.
• By the end of the play, Biff has come to learn that his future lies outside the city, telling Happy, “I know who I am, kid”.
• Shakespeare’s Richard eventually comes to recognise his mistakes, summed up in his last soliloquy before he is murdered:

  • “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me."
• The Great Gatsby:

  In The Great Gatsby it is left to the narrator, Nick Carraway, to provide this moment of self-discovery, imagining Gatsby before his death as finally realising the truth about himself.