ABSTRACT
The American playwright, Arthur Miller, posed the question of whether in the light of modern psychiatry, tragedy was any longer possible. His own The Death of A Salesman may be read as an answer to this question, especially when we consider that Miller perceived the assertion that tragedy depended upon the noble status of the protagonist to be nothing more than 'a clinging to the outward forms of tragedy'. In another essay which Miller wrote a month later, 'The Nature of Tragedy', he draws a distinction between pathos and tragedy, arguing that the precise difference between the two resides in the suggestion that 'tragedy brings us not only sadness, sympathy, identification and even fear; it also, unlike pathos, brings us knowledge or enlightenment'. In 1961 George Steiner published his influential The Death of Tragedy. His contention was that with the advent of, for example, Christianity and Marxism, the tragic sense of the world became eroded.
