twentieth century American tragedy: Defining Aristotelian hamartia and its allegorical function in Philip Roth's "I Married a Communist"

Philip Roth's novel I Married a Communist exhibits an important thematic current, one which demonstrates how immoderation in individual human character both reflects and proliferates an irrational and insidious political divisiveness, and more importantly, the far-reaching and devastating effects that extremism has on the individual. This theme is clearly derivative of Aristotle's ideas regarding literature and ethics. Furthermore, applying these ideas with those in Aristotle's Poetics, namely the concept of hamartia, I demonstrate how immoderation becomes the impetus for peripeteia, the reversal of fortune that ultimately destroys the novel's tragic hero, as defined by Aristotle.