The tragic plot

The question is what kind of plot produces the specific tragic effect — pity and fear — most completely. Aristotle's method is to eliminate the wrong candidates. First: a wholly virtuous person passing from good to bad fortune produces shock and revulsion, not pity and fear in the proper tragic sense, because the fall seems undeserved in a way that is simply offensive. Second: a wicked person passing from good to bad fortune is satisfying but inspires neither pity nor fear, since we require pity for someone who suffers undeservedly and fear for someone like ourselves. Third: a thoroughly bad person passing from bad to good fortune is morally the least tragic — it satisfies no tragic requirement.

The right protagonist is intermediate: a man not pre-eminently virtuous and just, but whose misfortune comes about not through wickedness or depravity but through some error (hamartia) — a person of high reputation and great prosperity, like Oedipus, Thyestes, or others from famous families. Hamartia here names the error of judgment or action by which the protagonist falls: not a moral failing of character in the full sense, but the missing of the mark by someone who is otherwise good and whose fall is therefore capable of generating pity (because they did not deserve it) and fear (because they are like us).

Aristotle then turns to plot structure. The best tragic plots are single rather than double in their issue — a single change of fortune for the protagonist, from good to bad, not a double plot with opposite outcomes for good and bad characters. The double plot, like the Odyssey, where the good prosper and the wicked are destroyed at the end, is popular because it satisfies the audience's sense of justice — but it is a pleasure proper to comedy, not to tragedy. Tragedy produces its specific pleasure precisely by departing from the requirement that good be rewarded; its cathartic effect depends on the disproportionate fall.

The second-best form is the complex single plot in which reversal and recognition coincide — which is, Aristotle says, what many consider the highest form, though he reserves that judgment. The worst form is the simple plot with opposite outcomes for good and bad characters throughout (not just at the end): this is pure comic structure and has no place in tragedy. The chapter closes by distinguishing the pleasures: tragedy should produce the pleasure proper to tragedy, not any chance pleasure, and the poet must subordinate everything to producing that specific pleasure.