Jack Sayan

English 11
10-8-19
Tragic Hero

A tragic hero is someone that is in a play who begins the story with a great life and is on

top of the world but makes a bad mistake or has a personality flaw and leads to his downfall.

John Proctor is a tragic hero in The Crucible because he starts with a great life very respected in

his town but later makes a poor decision that changed his life. The setting of the play was in

Salem in 1692 and the government was a theocracy where religion dictated all the laws. Society

believed in witches but John didn’t believe in them.

In Jons's life, he was a prosperest respected man in the town who didn’t get into a lot of

fights and confrontations. John made one bad choice that had major impact on his life. Jon’s bad

trait was when he cheated on his wife for a 17-year-old girl named Abigail. This changed his

whole life because Abagail would bother him off about this and when his wife found out about

this she didn’t want to even talk to him. John imeitly apologized to his wife and tried to make it

up to her. Jon made a bad choice in his life and this will reflect on him and his family.

Jon’s actions were bad because they got his wife in trouble with Abigail and that caused

his wife to be taken away. Elisabeth fired Abigail from beeing a main and this made Abigail mad

atElisabethh. Abigail would bug John about her love for him and this mad his wife mad to the

point where she wouldn’t go to church because Elisabeth didn’t want to see Abigails’s face.

Abigail was so desperate for Johns’s love she accused his wife of being a witch.

John is a tragic hero because he put his life in front of his wife to save her. His

wife accepted being accused of being a wich but John didn’t want that to happen to his wife.

John confronts the minster by saying “God is dead” and continued to challenge him and his
beliefs in witchcraft. When John and his wife were in the cortroom she wanted to take the blame

but John didn’t want that to happen and he wanted to take the blame.

Arthur Miller wrote this book because he wanted to compare the U.S. Red Scares to the

Salem witch trials.

The connection between McCarthyism and the witch trials is obvious because people

accused others of being communists and the people that were accused were forced to rat out

there friends or get thrown in jail to rot. In Salem, the same thing happened; people were

accused unfairly just as the U.S. did in the ’50s. Arthur Miller makes the point because when he

was writing The Crucible he was beeing blacklisted in Hollywood because he was accused of

being a communist.

Arthur Miller was in the same situation just as John Proctor was because both of them

had everything but then one small incident in their life led to a tragic downfall. Arthur had a

great life just as John Proctor did, they both had wonderful wives and happy lives. The major

downfall for both of them was when they were both accused of actions they didn’t participate in.

Danforth and Senator McCarthy were both the same they were both the antagonists

because they let innocent people die or be thrown in jail. Both Danforth and McCarthy were

both terrible men and they both should have been punished for what they did to innocent people.

In conclusion, Jon Proctor was a great man who died for his wife and he was a

great protagonist in The Crucible. I think that he shouldn’t have been treated unfairly in the

courtroom and the town of Salem. Jon should have put on a better trial and not just sentence to

death in the book. Also, I think that Mcartheysm played a huge role in this book because

innocent people were accused of things they didn’t do. The people that were executed in The

Crucible were just innocent people living their lives and had nothing to do with witchcraft. I

think that is has a major connection to the Red Scars in the ’50s because instant U.S. citizens
were just thrown in jail and were miss treated for things they didn’t do. In the end, Salem’s way

of government is corrupt and broken and people should have been treated to a better trial.