Anakin/Vader as Aristotle's tragic hero

I was advised to bring this topic over here, it's been on the Episode III (spoilers) thread for a couple days if you want to see what they had to say. Not sure if anything like this has been brought up before, but here goes:

In my opinion Anakin/Vader is not a villain he?s a tragic hero. If all we knew was the OT then I would agree that he was just a villain, but now that we know his story, it fits perfectly in with the Aristotelian model of a ?tragic hero?. Look at the Saga as a whole when considering this.


The Greek philosopher Aristotle gave the most famous extended definition of tragedy in his Ars Poetica . Shakespeare's tragic works are similar. These are the characteristics:

1. A faulty or corrupt society, or at least some particular characters who are decidedly more wicked [The Sith]than the tragic hero[Anakin].

2. A tragic hero: by Aristotle's definition, a man who is neither completely evil nor good, but somewhere in between. The audience will usually identify or sympathize with the tragic hero, instinctively.

3. The Hero?s tragic flaw: (a) a chronic shortcoming in character, often called a "tragic flaw." In Shakespeare it is usually related, paradoxically, to the tragic hero's ideals of some sort; and it leads him into metaphorical "madness" which is barely distinguishable (if at all) from real madness. A particular result of this idealism/madness is that the hero will imagine the people around him as worse than they are and ironically he becomes more "corrupt" or dangerous than the social corruption he deplores[Perfect description of Anakin]. (b) a specific mistaken act, related to or caused by the "flaw."

4. The mistaken act will prove harmful to someone so close to the tragic hero as to be almost a "part of himself"; the beginning of a gradual suicide[Padme and the twins].

5. The hero discovers the mistake, and suffers and dies for it[At the end of ROTJ].

6. The full effect, as Aristotle had suggested, is to raise and purge the emotions of pity and fear in the audience, a sort of therapeutic cleansing of the imagination.

Shakespeare's tragic heroes generally fit the Aristotelian definition. Their moral failings vary greatly, but the tragic "mistake" is most typically associated with some sort of idealism that the hero believes himself to be practicing; some "code of behavior"[Anakin believes himself to be the "the most powerful" Jedi praticing the Jedi beliefs]. As Shakespearean comedy suggests, a rigid belief in the rightness of one's own course can be dangerous. Appearance does not correspond to reality, and that paradox destroys the tragic hero, who remains blind to it until after the reversal of his fortunes. The hero's "discovery" is only that appearances have played him a dirty trick; he does not discover the part his own blindness had in the tragedy. In fact, it shows a great persistence in his character that he typically tries to vindicate his idealized self-image in a final flurry of violence and/or suicide[End of Ep. III]. The paradox of tragedy is that a catastrophic change results from the blind constancy of one or more persons [ie. The Jedi Order]. Nevertheless, tragedy reaffirms the basic order of the natural universe, after purging a "mistaken" understanding of it which we (the audience) have first sympathized with (so that we pity ) and then felt threatened by (so that we fear ).
© http://smith.hanover.edu/trag.html

I'd like to hear what you all think of this. Do you believe Anakin/Vader to be a tragic hero or purely a villain?

 

I agree that Anakin is a tragic hero. I wrote an essay on tragic heros in 9th grade honors english and I used him as an example.


Anakin is the perfect tragic hero because he was once good as we saw in The Phantom Menace, but like all Tragic Heros he has a tragic flaw and for him it is that he's not able to let go of people that he loves. He's VERY posessive, and it led to his downfall.

 

tl;dr
anakin is a hero because he makes me when he dies ;-;

 

i couldnt agree more, vader is the hero and in the end the movies are his tail. Everytime i talk SW with a lay fn this comes up, and i always end up going on and on about how he is the real hero. After all it looked to me that luke was getting it handed to him and vader was the one that saved the galaxy ended empiral riegn

 

I always figured that Anakin/Vader wasn't a tragic hero in the Aristotelian sense because he's "saved" at the end. It's been a while since I studied Classical tragedy, but I'm pretty sure that there's not supposed to be any positive "character arc" for tragic heroes--they go down lamenting, but basically unrepentant.

Boba Fett might be a tragic hero. Qui-Gon Jinn may be a tragic hero. You might even be able to squeeze some tragic heroism out of Palpatine/the Emperor, assuming you considered him a fortunate or enviable person at some point. (You don't have to like Aristotelian tragic heroes. You just have to envy them. That's why it's especially delicious when they crash and burn.)

I think Anakin/Vader's story is basically one of fall and redemption. He goes full circle from good to evil and back to good again. A Classical tragic hero's journey goes in one direction--straight down.

Edit: That doesn't mean that A/V isn't heroic in any way. He can be heroic, and he can be tragic. He's just not Aristotle's tragic hero, that's all.