Tragedy and Comedy: The Two Faces of Story Structure

By David Griffin Brown

From Dionysus to Shakespeare

Storytelling has long leaned on two structures: comedy and tragedy. And no, that’s not comedy in the LMAO sense. In simplest terms, a comedy is a story in which the protagonist gets what they want at the end and a tragedy is a story in which they don’t.

Aristotle wrote about tragedy as a form that invites pity and fear before purging both in a moment of catharsis. The Greeks loved a grand downfall—Oedipus, Medea, Antigone—heroes brought low by fate, pride, or both. Their comedies, on the other hand, often celebrated renewal: marriages, births, mistaken identities sorted out in time for the final dance. 

Shakespeare continued the tradition. His comedies end with music, weddings, and a sense that chaos has given way to harmony. His tragedies leave bodies on the stage and a friend or chorus to reflect on the ruin. Comedy often begins in trouble and ends in harmony; tragedy begins in harmony and ends in trouble.

And yet comedy and tragedy share the same raw ingredients: a protagonist striving toward a goal, a flaw or blind spot to wrestle with, rising action, a turning point, a climax. The difference lies in timing and outcome. In a comedy, the hero’s growth comes in time to win the day. In a tragedy, the lesson comes too late—or not at all.

The Timing of Transformation

The timing of when a character learns and changes impacts everything about how a story lands. In the comic structure, transformation comes before the climax. The hero hits a breaking point, faces the lie they’ve been living with, and comes out the other side ready to act in a new way. Their victory feels earned because it hinges on self-discovery as well as external triumph.

Tragedies flip this order. The character may cling to a false belief right through the climax, or they may only glimpse the truth after everything falls apart. Oedipus realizes he has fulfilled the prophecy only when it’s too late to stop it. Gatsby follows the green light to his demise. Dorian Gray sees the cost of his hedonism only when his portrait—and soul—condemn him.

Sometimes the protagonist dies before they can process anything at all. In Moby-Dick and The Great Gatsby, it falls to a surviving narrator to carry the lesson forward. Ishmael lives to tell us about Ahab’s obsession; Nick Carraway walks away disillusioned by Gatsby’s hollow pursuit. The reader is left to process the transformation because the protagonist isn’t around to learn from their mistakes.

High Notes and Low Notes

Two plot points highlight this difference better than any others: the “all is lost” moment and the “false victory.”

In a comedy, the protagonist stumbles closer and closer to failure before things turn around. They lose the job, the love interest, the map to the treasure. They believe it’s over—we get to see them on the brink of complete defeat. This despair forces them to face the inner problem that has been holding them back. So when they rise and win in the climax, the victory feels like a miracle they earned through that inner work.

Tragedy trades despair for triumph. Near the end, the protagonist appears to have won. The promotion comes through. The villain falls. The love interest says yes. But we sense the trap closing because the protagonist hasn’t changed. Their old flaw still drives them. What looks like victory is only the setup for the final blow. Gatsby thinks he has won Daisy back. Captain Ahab closes in on his dream of vengeance. The story gives us hope only to twist the knife.

The all-is-lost moment and false victory are often teased or mirrored at the midpoint, though that’s not always the case. The important takeaway here is that rising action builds in the opposite direction of where the climax will land. If the protagonist is going to succeed, then you want to bring them closer and closer to failure. If they are going to fail, you want to bring them closer and closer to victory. That gives the climax more of an emotional impact.

But let’s not neglect the tragicomedy! Occasionally we see both of these beats in one story. A character may lose everything, gain it all back, then crash again in the finale. They might choose to fail at their external goal because of a late-stage reversal, fully embracing that what they wanted was not in fact what they needed at all. Their failure might allow them an unanticipated success. Or their technical success could end up being terrible for them.

Life rarely adheres to a clean dichotomy of Success Versus Failure, and the same is true for many great novels.

The Impact of a Fatal Flaw

Tragedy can have a couple different impacts on readers in terms of emotional draw. In some stories, we want the hero to succeed. We cheer them on, flaws and all. When they fall, we feel the lesson land alongside them. Anne of Green Gables works this way. Despite her flaws, we want Anne to achieve all her dreams. She’s just too much of a bright light to end up any other way. But then Matthew dies at the end, and she decides to set her dream aside to stay on the farm and help Marilla. And right along with her, we know it’s the right decision. She’s sacrificing for family. She’s growing up.

Other tragedies invite a different reaction. The hero’s fatal flaw glares at us from the start, and we read with a kind of dread. We don’t want murderous Macbeth to win the crown. We don’t want Dorian Gray to keep living a life of selfish hedonism. So rather than cheer for them to achieve their narrative goal, we are instead cheering for them to realize the error of their ways and turn the damn ship around. In this way, when they reach their false victory, it lands as an all-is-lost moment for the reader. The hero might celebrate, but we can see the writing on the wall.

Pulling Heartstrings: Structure as an Emotional Tool

Story structure is an emotional machine. The order of events controls what the reader feels and when they feel it. Comedy lifts us up after dragging us through despair and foreboding. Tragedy drops us after letting us believe we’ve made it to safety.

Choosing between them means choosing the kind of emotional whiplash you want your reader to experience. Romance promises the comedy arc: misunderstandings, breakups, reconciliations, then happily ever after. Horror often leans tragic: the monster wins, or victory costs too much. Noir practically defines itself by the hero’s downfall—they might solve the case, but they betray their own code in the process. Mysteries and thrillers can swing either way depending on whether justice arrives in time. Literary fiction often plays in the gray space, giving us wins laced with loss or failures that feel strangely liberating.

The point isn’t to follow a formula. It’s to understand the effect each structure creates. Comedy reassures us. Tragedy warns us. Tragicomedy shrugs and says, this is life—funny, cruel, messy.

When you decide where the character’s transformation falls, whether want and need will align or collide, whether the big moment is a false victory or an all-is-lost defeat, you decide how the story will live in the reader’s heart after the final page.

David Griffin Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer and co-author of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling and Story Skeleton: The Classics. His debut novel, When the Sky Breaks, was released in 2025. He holds a BA in anthropology from UVic and an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and his writing has been published in literary magazines such as the Malahat Review and Grain. In 2022, he was the recipient of a New Artist grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. He lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.