Is Troy Maxson a “Tragic Hero?” Essay

Whereas Troy is the financial supporter for the Maxson household, Rose provides the emotional support for the family. Rose is seen reassuring Troy for any decisions or actions he has made and bringing him back to reality when he starts telling his fictional stories. After Gabriel comes to visit, Troy expresses feelings of guilt for using his brother’s money to buy

Troy has a solid external goal and he’s driven by his inner, emotional need to find out about his biological parents and connect. It’s a solid goal and objective. The stakes are personal.

Troy Maxson, from the play Fences, has shown that he poses the qualities of a tragic hero. A tragic Hero is defined as a literary character who makes a judgment error that inevitably leads to his/her own destruction. Troy has many faults but there is more good in him than it may seem.

This can affect his family in a negative way, and we see the scars on him from his past and now he begins to make decisions for others. And Troy believes he’s a changed man from prison, but he refuses to believe the world around him has changed. He is unhappy with Lyons’s choice of a career as a musician.“It is too easy, just not physical enough, not manly enough”. He has ideas of self-pride that have to be firmly squashed by the father.

Troy Maxson was a static character, over the course of the play his mindset never transformed, nor his attitude. He only saw his son and his wife as his responsibility and nothing more, he believed that the white man cheated him out of becoming a professional baseball player, even though the real reason was because he was too old, and he believed that life was against him. Despite his cynical and resentful attitude towards life, Troy Maxson is an iconic static

Troy feels guilty for not being around for Lyons growing, instead, Troy was serving his fifteen years sentence. Lyons is thirty-four year old still getting financial support from Troy. However, he never urged Lyon to get another career. Instead, he gave up and let Lyon take advantage of him. But when it came to Cory, Troy was very assertive and short tempered. He refuses to sign the consent forms for Cory’s football draft and ruins his chances at a football career. There was a fearsome relationship between Troy and Cory. All Cory ever wanted was his father’s affection. He even asks Troy if he likes him. All Cory ever gotten from Troy was fear, he never knew if his father genuinely liked him or not. “You my flesh and blood. Not cause I like you! Cause it’s my duty to take care of you. I ain’t got to like you.”(Wilson 40).

Troy Maxon’s struggles originated deep within his roots from when he was still a child. With his mother leaving them to their abusive father, he ran away from home at a very young age. The fourteen-year-old Troy had to endure poverty and racism while growing up all alone. Confronted by a series of unfortunate events, Troy’s history caused him his relationships with

In the Drama based book Fences, August Wilson illustrates the tragic heroism of Troy Maxson as Troy faces troubling conflicts up to the point of his death. Throughout the play, his actions end up being misinterpreted or show an impure side to him, causing for his wife Rose and his son Cory to resent him. This is illustrated many times in the play, first through the refusal to allow Cory to play football, second through the use of his brother’s war reparations in order to buy his house, and third through the affair that he has with Alberta.

From the beginning of the paper, it is evident that Troy is a prideful character with bad morals. He thinks he was better than anyone else. He brags on his batting skills about when he used to be a baseball star in the black league. You see later on that Troy struggles with his self and the relationship with his son. It is the struggles that you see within him drinking and the marriage at first that leads to many more of his problems with other people in his life. He openly admits to an affair and when he does, Cory is outraged. He tries to keep Cory from achieving his dream in a hypocritical and jealousy way which escalated the other arguments between the two of them.

We also see how there was equality when it came to the family as Troy regarded his wife and also was there for the family. Troy missing out on the American dream to play baseball for the major league shows his bitterness towards his son decision to play for the college scholarship (Menson-Furr 223). He tried to dissuade him from making such a decision and tries

In the play Fences, by August Wilson, Troy Maxson is the protagonist as he is the center of the play. Troy has a unique relationship with everybody in the play which makes him the glue that holds his family and friends together. However, Troy has great flaws that have generated from his past that ultimately take him to his downfall. Troy’s self-centeredness, arrogance, and stubbornness is what leads him to his downfall, and ultimately, his death.

Troy’s quest to take back all what life has taken from him; makes him a control freak. He tries to control everything his sons does thinking he is making the right decision for them. This decision did not only bring people around him down bur destroys the relationship between himself and his family.

Troy Maxson is a walking example of internal conflict, and his biggest struggle of internal conflict is a direct correlation to his affair with Alberta. Troy never struggles with the actual affair or the act of committing adultery, and he certainly never seems too concerned for Rose’s feelings. He recognizes how faithful Rose is to him, yet he still does it. His conflict arises when he has to ask Rose to raise his little girl. He is overwhelmed when Alberta dies because he has never had to be a father to his other children. He had Rose to raise them for him. He is conflicted to ask Rose because he does recognize how wrong it is, but he does it anyway because he feels like he has no other choice. Another way in which Troy deals with internal conflict is the issue of race. Troy does not want his son, Cory to play college football. Troy attempted to play professional sports, but he was too old to play when he tried out. Troy saw this as a way of being racially discriminated against. He lets it get in the way of his rational mind when he tells Cory no. He automatically jumps the gun and tells Cory no without ever thinking about anything else. This is a main issue that blocks his rational thoughts and causes delusions that hand-in-hand lead him to create conflict. Troy also creates a conflict with his son, Lyons over the issue of

During the beginning of Troy’s life, he faced life-changing dilemmas that affected his future permanently. While with his parents, he was under their protection, eventually he needed to escape, as Troy told, “When my turn come to head out, I was fourteen…”(Wilson 1405). Troy fled his only known family at a young age, disregarding his own comfort. Therefore, he was left to survive alone. He also explained that his father was in a great deal of debt while he was also taking care of eleven children, which goes to show, he didn’t have an inspiring role model, and had to make his own values.

Throughout the scenes, Troy seemingly echoes the faults of his own father. The tension appears to play into the “circle of life or break the chain” phrases or clichés, towards the end, the audience is given hope that Cory will be able to separate his upbringing to what is right. The movie compels us to ask, what it is to be a man, especially within scenes involving Troy, Bono (Troy’s best friend) or even Lyons (Troy’s oldest son). We question what it takes to be a “good” or “worthy” man, or what the obligations are to ones’ family or even to ones’