Similarities Between A Hero And Woyzeck A Tragic Hero

Tragic figures are characters that aim for a goal but never reach it. They suffer throughout their story and are most likely to die before the play ends. The tragic hero is the most commonly known of these figures, but tragic villains also exist. An example of the tragic hero is Franz Woyzeck, of Georg Büchner’s working-class tragedy ‘Woyzeck’. Compared and contrasted to Woyzeck is the tragic villain, Ferdinand, of John Webster’s tragedy ‘The Duchess of Malfi’. Both characters fail to gain what they desire because they suffer of a mental illness.

Franz Woyzeck is an unusual tragic character, mainly because he is one of the few heroes who doesn’t die at the end of his play. However, the form of the play as a whole is unusual, which may be because

He is a simple-minded soldier, happy to come home after a working day, to his lover Marie and their child. Looking at the characters around Woyzeck, it seems as if with increasing classes, the characters’ decency and kindness decrease. This is displayed in cases of the Doctor and the Captain, who have the highest status of all characters in the play. But at the same time, they are the ones who have the most influence in Woyzeck’s downfall. The Captain verbally diminishes Woyzeck, by calling him “horribly stupid” (Scene 6, P. 16) and telling him he has no morals, for having a bastard child with Marie. He is the one who reveals the secret about the affair between Marie and the Drum Major to Woyzeck. The Doctor humiliates him just as much and exploits him as a public medical experiment. His methods are rather questionable, but the play takes time right after the Enlightenment, during the ‘Age of Experience’. In that time, scientists liked to test new theories about how things worked through unconventional practices. He orders Woyzeck to live on a pea-based diet to see how it influences his urine and his pulse. In front of an audience of