Riders To The Sea as A Tragedy - Discuss in Brief

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      The dominant feelings which a tragedy producers are as Aristotle said those of "Pity and Fear" and those two feelings also imply sympathy affection, dread, awe, terror etc. The play Riders To The Sea is an excellent example of modern one act tragedy. Although this play has not the Shakespearean dimensions and his great sense of tragedy, still the play is called a tragedy. Without having any Hamlet or a King Lear the play produce all the successive feeling of an ideal tragic atmosphere. The tragedy here is not found involving any murder or bloodshed, it also do not include any kind of conspiracy. Rather the tragedy here consist in the successive death of several male member of a family living close to the sea on a Iceland.

Rider To The Sea

      All the men of this family perished in the sea and become the the victims of a miracles force of nature. The protagonist Maurya has lost her husband her son and one after the other all the deaths have left her completely alone in the world. Maurya is the victim of the mighty omnipotent power of the sea, and she fights vainly against it by trying to prevent her lost surviving son Bartley, from going out to the sea in the form of a cruel fete which dominates her life and family. And thus in the play the ruthless sea appears to be the omnipotent fate devouring up helpless humans causing gloomy tragedy in the life of Maurya and her children.

      Inner most core sea of grief in Maurya gradually embraces her sorrows for letting go every single male member in her family, toward the dimension of mortality. At the same time, she turn away the terrible force of the sea and tries to regain her inner strength to live the rest of her life with two of her daughters. Her motherhood perishes, in the conflict between Maurya and the sea. The unparalleled solicitation of Riders to the Sea lies in the depiction of a tragic sense of 'Genuine Tragedy'.

      Riders to the Sea is a tragic chorus which draws its strength from the quality of acceptance which Synge had discovered in the islanders among whom he had lived. It moves on a limited plan: the inevitability of the conflict between men and the sea, and the inevitability of the men’s defeat. When the last of Maurya’s sons has been drowned she speaks to herself:

      They’re all gone now, and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me... They’re all together this time, and the end is come. May the Almighty God have mercy on Bartley’s soul, and on Michael’s soul, and on the souls of Sheamus and Patch, - and Stephen and Shawn; and may He have mercy on my soul, Nora, and on the soul of every one is left living in the world... Michael has a clean burial in the far north, by the grace of the Almighty God. Bartley will have a fine coffin out of the white boards, and a deep grave surely. What more can we want than that? No man at all can be living forever, and we must be satisfied.

      It is powerful rhythm, within a, limited action. Its paradox is the depth of its language and the starved, almost passive experience. It is as if the fatalism were determined at one level and the lives of the islanders at another, and then the two are fused, but incompletely in a dominant single rhythm? As such it is a dramatic fragment for reasons other than its brevity, but what he achieved in this fragment is an indication of that common action which the theory of language might be, at its most serious. What has been achieved, that is to say, is a chorus, but not yet the action on which the chorus depends.