The role of time in ‘The Tragedy of Man’

Abstract

It hardly needs proving that time plays a vital role in The Tragedy of Man; just think of Ádám’s statement in the third scene: “Time hastens and my days pass fleetingly by.”1 The following analysis starts from the fact that Tragédia - as Tamás Bécsy once showed - is a two-level drama. It aims to show that the time dimensions of the two levels are different, and the essence of the role of time is the meeting of these two dimensions, as well as the “coexistence” and interaction of the two levels (in Tamás Bécsy’s term) of the action (Bécsi, 1973).