Troy Maxson Tragic Hero Essay

Troy Maxson, from the play Fences, is an ordinary man. Through ignorance and selfishness he proves this point over and over again throughout the play. As a result, he could never amount to a great man; therefore; Troy Maxson is not a tragic hero. A tragic hero is “a literary character who has potential for heroic qualities, however, he or she makes an error of judgment or has a fatal flaw that, combined with fate and external forces brings on a tragedy.” Therefore, Troy Maxson does not match those qualities. There is nothing heroic about what he does; for example, his son, his flesh and blood, wanted so badly to play football, but his own father wouldn’t support his dream. He said to his son Cory, “ You a bigger fool than I thought…to let someone take
For example, his wife, Rose, wanted a fence built around their little home. She wanted her husband home with her. She wanted him to do something other than run off every Saturday or sit on the porch and drink. Furthermore, when he ran off every Saturday, rather than staying home with his wife and family, he ran down to get rid of responsibilities and take some weight off his shoulders. So what Rose really got was a lying, cheating husband, who went off and started another family with another woman. Troy Maxson caused pain to his family. He tore up his family and left it all up to his wife to take care of another woman’s child. No matter what, Troy had no chance to become a tragic hero. He was in too deep. By the end of his life, he had lost respect from pretty much everyone who was supposed to love him. In conclusion, Troy Maxson is nothing close to a hero. He was an awful man. He couldn’t even show love to his kids. All he seemed to worry about was his own happiness. No matter what he did in his life, he did too much bad for any good to ever come out of him; therefore, no one could consider him any kind of a