Tragic tales draw enormous pity and empathy from the audience who get a chance, to either read and/or listen to them. Often, the heroes of tragic tales experience punishments that are beyond the implied committed crimes arising from the lethal mistakes they make.
By learning from the mistakes made in the due course, the heroes acquire self-knowledge coupled with an abundant wisdom enough to make them go back to their normal life sure of one thing: never to repeat the errors.
Consistent with Aristotle’s suggested reasons as to why people flocked to the Greek theatres, at least to have a firsthand feel of tragic theatre shows, people leave in a world full of imperfections, which challenge them adequately rendering them hopeless: never to think of succeeding in their endeavors of dealing with challenges.
Even today, people prefer tragic shows. By watching the shows, people redeem their hope of coping with challenging situations and perhaps leaving the theatre with a reformed mindset. The success of the protagonist is particularly essential since he/she becomes a role model and a subject of drawing comparisons of the depth of lifelong encountered problems among the audience.
As a way of example, audience prefers tragic stories as a way of encouragement to adopt steps that would see them succeed in their daily chores, as opposed for instance to some autobiographic tales of successful characters. Perhaps that is why people prefer to learn, not only from their mistakes, but also from those of oters. In the actual form, the entire learning process entails some sort of tragedies.
Zimmer in Grade School provides a substantially close packed humiliating story of a boy who struggles to deal with his school ordeals with no one capable of coming for his rescue. Perhaps in the modern world, empathetic readers would pose a challenging concern as to why the church, family and concerned educators hardly come to help the boy. However, this presentation aids the poet to achieve his literally style of fostering catharsis.
Telling this story in form of a poem is advocated for, since the symbols used serve to represent hundreds of words that could be used if the poem was to be put in any other genre. For instance the mask, symbolically explains all the ordeals engulfed within the narrator.
On the other hand, in Eleven, the situation depicted by Sandra is well suited to the purpose short stories intend to serve, despite the fact that the story opens up by unveiling all the meaning of the being ‘eleven’ and hence taking incredibly almost the entire narration space.
The red sweater ordeal is perhaps well explained in a story format as opposed to other genres such as poetry. Providing the meaning of being eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, etc, all at the same time would prove problematic in a poem since poems are brief in nature.
Consequently, on my part, I prefer the use of poetry as a vehicle for telling Zimmer in Grade One, just as the way it is. The red sweater ordeal is one situation that draws many imaginational images to the mind of the reader. Eleven would have thus been more effective, if presented in form of a short video or on a stage skit.
The speaker in the poem The Mask remains unidentified all through the poem. All that is told is that the anonymous speaker struggles to hide the realty of his/her situation from other people always. The mask shrouds the suffering of the speaker.
The speaker must take caution to make sure that the mask remains intact by being vigilant lest the mask falls off exposing the realty of a tormented personality. According to well-documented historical sources, though not provided in the poem, the author is a black American who lived in the late nineteenth century.
In addition, the author had suffered from tuberculosis dying at a young age in the same century. By putting into consideration the stigmatization associated with such chronic ailments then, the author through speculation may have been the speaker. However, for critical analysis purpose of the poem, there is no warranty of such a speculation. In the last stanza of The Mask, the author uses ‘we’ to denote all people, the persona inclusive.
The ‘We’ shows how all people have worn the mask leave alone the persona. This can be interpreted as author’s attempt to draw a general conclusion on the message of the poem. ‘We’ refers thus to all other people who undergo hidden tortures, which they do not want unveiled to others, tantamount to the speaker’s predicament.
Non-provision of information pertaining to who wore the mask is deliberate. By over perusing the information about who wore the mask could obscure the message contained in the poem. Otherwise, Durbar could have provided substantial details if they were necessary for unmasking the intended message in the poem.