ABSTRACT
This chapter briefs some examples of tragic writing closely into view in the midst of intensive thinking about modern fiction, to throw outlines into relief and obtain valuable insight. The conscious life of the hero is progressively forced into isolation, and the threat is that death will only complete the process of extinction. But to make the interior self and the full self known is the resisting force in the play. There lies the play's strongest reason for being, if we think of drama particularly as the intense expression of the anthropocentric impulse. An intelligent indifference has its own road to power, and we can guess that its "emotions delighting us" come from more than satisfied curiosity. That pleasure must linger in the connotations of the word "absurd", in irony, in self-awareness, in the lucidity of the comic spirit. The tragic hero follows knowledge as far as he can, and remains human.
