Vanity

Introduction

Do appearances always communicate the truth to others? I think that the reader has gone through enough experiences in life to realize that the answer is no. There have been so many instances when people realize that things are not what they seem. If this is the case, then why do so many people rely on appearances to communicate a truth about them that does not exist? People base their identities on one idea instead of reinventing themselves. In other words, they create an identity that is not built by themselves, but an idea of what they think they should be. This over-reliance on appearance tends to cause others to believe everything they see about another person. We have learned throughout life that appearance is not always the truth, and people who rely too heavily on appearances are only fooling themselves. Thus, people must be skeptical about what they see or hear. Unfortunately, when we are not skeptical about appearances, we are deceived and even hurt in the process because we simply relied on appearances. Therefore, it is important to find literature that shows that people can be hurt by simply relying on their own or other’s vanity. In this entry, I analyze a protagonist who relies on his daughters’ vanity in King Lear and a character who is obsessed with his own masculine vanity in Things Fall Apart. First, I will talk about the concept of the tragic flaw to understand the message both stories are conveying.

The Tragic Flaw

In this entry, I discuss two tragedies because the deception of reality is such an unfortunate experience students have. Thus, I look at two tragedies in which the deception or over-dependence of appearances causes ones’ downfall. Since I am looking at two tragedies, I think it is important to the reader to understand the concept of the tragic flaw, which the protagonists of both stories possess. When a character has a tragic flaw, it is a characteristic of a character that causes his or her downfall. The author who is most famous for using this concept in his work is the great William Shakespeare. Other authors have used Shakespeare’s plays as inspiration to use the tragic flaw for their own works. What does this mean for other human beings who are exposed to this concept in a piece of literature? Perhaps they can see themselves in other characters who have that same characteristic as the tragic hero who causes his or her downfall in the end. The use of the tragic flaw in literature is not used to make someone feel bad about themselves, but rather to give insight to human nature to see what harm these characteristics can cause. Thus, the use of the tragic flaw is to make people aware of what kind of harm a characteristic can cause so that the reader can self-monitor that characteristic so it does not cause harm. I will speak more about this in the values section when I talk about how Shakespeare uses the tragic flaw in King Lear and Chinua Achebe uses it in Things Fall Apart.