On the Nature of Tragedy
   Arthur Miller, the author of "On the Nature of Tragedy" starts off his views on Tragedy by stating that tragedy, in this time today, is used as an epithet. But, an exact appreciation of tragedy can help us understand the workings of plays. He thinks that people are confusing tragedy, with just being pathetic. To back up his point he states that every story must have a conflict, to obtain any validity at all. The conflict between two people will eventually reach its height in a form of physical violence, and when it does, it has a status that defines melodrama in general.
   To further go on about the subject of conflict, Miller says that the next conflict, higher than the last, is the conflict within two people, the combatants. It is higher because he thinks it reflects the process of a humans actions, and it can be the actions can be used to create a better melodrama. And if you were to focus closer on the conflict between the combatants, it would be a better melodrama. He backs up this point by offering that melodrama becomes diffused when real characterizations come into play.
   And when an individual thinks about why a man is acting, and what is preventing him from acting, it becomes harder and more difficult to contain action in the arbitrary form of melodrama.
   Miller then restates the difference of tragedy and being pathetic. Both the two, invoke an emotion from the audience, but they're different emotions. He states an example, that if an individual were to be struck by a falling piano and dies, the newspapers would be calling this a tragedy. But, instead, it is pathetic. Not only because of the accidental nature of the individuals death, but it arouses ones feeling of sympathy, sadness, and possibility of identification. Tragedy brings us all these things, along with knowledge and enlightenment.
   Arthur Miller then states that the knowledge gained is that of living the right way in this world. The death of the individual was in a manner that it didn't illustrate any right way to live or go on about living with our ideals. It was not ethical. He also states the reason we confuse the tragic with the pathetic is because the writers of the stories had long ago given up on finding the right way to live, and that there is no commonly accepted faith among people to give us material gain and satisfaction.
   Arthur Miller thinks modern literature has an attitude that implies that even if a man has suffered dearly, nothing important can be learned by a man that raises him to a happier way of life. Learning people has been taken over by behaviorism. Through this, writers behave in a way that only spells out the anatomy of the disaster at hand, and the humans don't develop through the story, but instead go on as puppets being guided by the writers, the puppeteers, through a maze dubbed "plot". The characters in the story, by the end, remain unchanged in the way that they haven't taken anything useful from the experience.
   Tragedy, a exalted consciousness, is called because it reminds us of what the character could have been by the end. A tragedy is when characters are wholly and intensely realized until the audience's belief in their tragedy, the characters tragedy, their reality, is complete. The story they are in makes the audience aware of the characters sadness, and that you understand how the ending may have been altered. Arther Miller ends  by stating that, in a word, tragedy is an accurate portrayal of humans and a humans long struggle for happiness. The reason we hold tragedies in such high regard, is because they portray us, and it is the ultimate means of showing what, or who, and how we've come to be this way.