Othello Tragic Hero Essay

According to Aristotle a tragic hero is a protagonist character who makes an error that inevitably leads to his/her own downfall; in the play The tragedy of Othello by William Shakespeare, the main character Othello a noble moor whose insecurity, poor judgment and jealousy leads to his destruction. Othello is a military general from North Africa. He has left this native land to live in Venice, Italy. He is well respected by the people and his Italian community. Unfortunately when he marries a noble birth white woman by the name of Desdemona, hell breaks loose. At the time when the play was written in the early 1600s: black people were not always accepted by society, let alone, an interracial marriage by a white woman and black man. However,

1 sc.1 line 98-99). Othello is presented as an outsider from the start of the play. He is referred as “the thick-lips”, “ a Barbary horse” and “the devil”. Factors such as these and his age, him not being educated like the other European man and his self-consciousness about being a racial and cultural outsider makes him very insecure. “Haply for I am black,/And have not those soft parts of conversation,/That chamberers have; or for I am declined,/Into the vale of years—yet that’s not much…’’(Act 3,sc.3 lines 304-307). In act 1 when he was telling her father about how he won her over he was much confident and was assure that he won Desdemona over with his storytelling. However, after Iago suggests Othello about suspicions of his wife’s unfaithfulness, Othello begins to believe that his race and age is the reason why Desdemona would cheat on him. “...the suggestion that he is not an Italian, not even a European; that he is totally ignorant of the thoughts and customary morality of venetian women…(Bradley,5). This the first time in the play we see Othello himself showing his insecurity on either his race or his age. “This consciousness in any imaginative man is enough, in such a circumstances, to destroy his confidence in his power of perception” (Bradley, 5). I agree with Professor Bradley that if someone had a manipulator like Iago, it is very easy to get jealous and insecure especially with

“He is not observant. His nature Tends outward. He is quite free from introspection, and is not given to reflection. Emotion excites his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect” (Bradley, 3). In act 2 Othello finds Cassio his lieutenant drunk and fighting with the other solider. Othello was quick fire Cassio immediately after Iago says that Cassio was the one who started the fight. “His trust, where he trust, is absolute. Hesitation is almost impossible to him. He is extremely self- reliant, and decides and acts instantaneously” (Bradley, 4). Othello was also quick to trust Iago because Iago was always there when wrong things were happening and he was first to tell Othello “what really happened”.“Iago is most honest” (Act 2, Scene 3). In actuality Iago is truly the devil. He tells lies to manipulate Othello into thinking he is married to unfaithful wife. Due to Othello being very quick to trusting Iago, he was blinded by the lies of Iago’s stories, that stop to question him or he couldn’t even listen to his wife’s side of the story or Cassio’s side of the story before jumping to the false conclusion that the two had an