On The Beauty Of Death In The Western Classical Tragedy

Death is one of the eternal themes in literature. As the western classical tragedy used to be regarded as the summit of the western literature, death is the premise of the western ancient classical tragedy and the core of the Greek ancient tragedy.Therefore, death is the most typical theme in the western classical tragedy especially in the Greek tragedy. Though the golden period of tragedy has gone,the classical tragedy has almost been replaced by other literary genres and people are terrified of death, they never stop researching them.People can experience,understand and contemplate death through the feeling which the protoagnists experience. It will make them feel calm, harmonious and rational instead of feeling anxious,lonely or impetuous.Even more gratifying, they can still be further researched for which hasn’t been fully researched. Most importantly, the author is interested in the theme.Therefore, he chooses"on the beauty of death in the western classical tragedy"as the title of the thesis.This thesis consists of four parts.Firstly,four sorts of the protoagnist’s death in the western classical tragedy.The author sorts them into four kinds which are respectively the solemn and stirring death, the grief and indignant death, the sad and brutal death,the sorrowful and regretful death from the aspect of the Psychology of Emotion after extensively reading all of the relevant tragic texts.Secondly,the protoagnist’s death manifested in the text. Death is manifested as death——conciousness because of its widely existence in the western classical tragedy.Therefore, it is necessary to have a thorough and clear unstanding of the death——conciousness before having a further research on the aesthetic value of death imaginary.Thirdly,the author concludes that the aesthetic value of the death in the four kinds of death in the western classical tragedy are respectively the natural sublime, the helpless sublime, the restrained sublime and the regretful sublime compared with the protoagnist’s tragic death in the Chinese classical tragedy according to the previous chapters.Finally,transcendence of the biological death by the tragic death.The transcendence is mainly based on the great personality of the protoagnists.This kind of personality is eternal because it is the common character of the human beings.There are totally four aspects which are respectively the confidence in challenging to death,the courage of facing death,the life after death and the unfinished transcendence.In all, after a thorough and detailed reasearch, the author concludes that death is not so fearful as imagined,what people really fear is fear itself.Only if people make infinite efforts to pursuit their ideals and to realize the value of their life can they not be regretful or fearful while death is coming.