Just a thought...
Goethe's Werther and Shakespeare's Hamlet are the two foremost comic characters in all of literature.
Cervantes' Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the most tragic pair in all of letters?
What is tragedy? A man waits passively for the gatekeeper to open a door that shall remain forever closed.
Werther surely is not tragic. Werther is a fool - all men in love are fools. But a tragedy he is not. In the end, he shoots himself - unable to live without his Lotte. High comedy! Lotte is a mere daemon, no goddess. To kill oneself for a daemon, how absurd! Young Werther's letters to Wilhelm were merely gestural, a vain showcase of the heightened melodrama stirring within his intoxicated mind. A bumbling intoxicated fool can be nothing else but an amusing comedic spectacle. So to call Goethe's thinly veiled autobiographical work a great tragic novel does him a great disservice - he does go on to write his Faust and does not end up with a hole in his head. Goethe mocks his own moribund unrequited love - purportedly for a Charlotte Buff - through the comical confessions of Werther. Goethe confessed he felt a sense of freedom and deliverance upon completing Werther. Only a work of great comic resonance like Werther provides catharsis, while tragedy reinforces the obstinacy of melodrama. Werther is a most ingenious and subtle satire. So much so, that those who misread it as an endorsement of suicide and committed their own also misread it as a tragedy. So my friends, the next time you pick up Goethe's Werther, laugh along with the poet at an impossibly absurd and comic character - a man of unrequited love; for humourlessness is the height of blunt and uninteresting tragedy.
