The tragic hero is a concept Johannes de silentio uses to represent a person who makes great personal sacrifices for the greater good and is praised for it by everyone because everyone benefits from their sacrifice. Like a knight of faith and a knight of infinite resignation, a tragic hero is willing to give up something very precious to them, but it’s more like an exchange. They give up one precious thing for another benefit, one that helps not just themselves but everyone else around them. Johannes uses Agamemnon—who sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to appease an angry goddess—as a prime example of a tragic hero. On the other hand, a knight of faith makes a personal sacrifice for both God’s sake and their own (God’s sake because it’s his will and their own sake so that they have the means of proving their faith and devotion to God), and it sometimes violates universal ethics in such a way that they are condemned by all those who don’t understand faith. Because all it takes is sacrificing something personal for the greater good, it is relatively easy to become a tragic hero and achieve greatness that way.
Tragic Hero Quotes in Fear and Trembling
The tragic hero renounces himself in order to express the universal; the knight of faith renounces the universal in order to be the particular.
But as the task is given to Abraham, it is he who must act, so he must know at the decisive moment what he is about to do, and accordingly must know that Isaac is to be sacrificed. If he doesn’t definitely know that, he hasn’t made the infinite movement of resignation, in which case his words are not indeed untrue, but then at the same time he is very far from being Abraham, he is less significant than a tragic hero, he is in fact an irresolute man who can resolve to do neither one thing nor the other, and who will therefore always come to talk in riddles. But such a Haesitator [waverer] is simply a parody of the knight of faith.
Tragic Hero Symbol Timeline in Fear and Trembling
