Semiotics of Exile in Tragedy

Abstract

This chapter studies the function of exile in tragedy. The protagonists in the three novels—Toni Morrison’s Beloved, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Dreiser’s An American Tragedy — are all socially marginalized. In Beloved, the racially ostracized heroine’s assertion for human dignity ends in violent infanticide. In The Great Gatsby and An American Tragedy, the impoverished social outcasts’ aspiration for the material and spiritual implication of the American Dream brings about their destruction. In all these novels, tragic heroes are featured as ostracized loners in a boundary situation, wherein good and bad are inextricably mixed.