presents his struggle best when, pondering her hus-
band’s character, she states:
It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be
great,
Art not without ambition, but without,
The illness that should accompany it. What
thou wouldst highly
That wouldst thou holily—wouldst not play
false
And yet would wrongly win. (1.5.17–22)Macbeth, in order to achieve his goals, gives in to
his uncivilized desires and becomes a tragic figure:
someone who made the wrong moral choice. Ulti-
mately, this costs him not only the power that he
desires but also his life.
This trend of identifying ambition as a central
character trait—sometimes a strength, sometimes a
flaw—proceeded from the Byronic hero of the 19th
century to the more modern antihero. Perhaps one
of the best examples in modernism of an antihero is
the character of Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s
A portrait^ oF^ the artist^ as^ a younG Man. Deda-
lus even goes so far as to compare himself to Satan
when he claims “non serviam,” or “I will not serve.”
Like the character of Satan, Dedalus desires to be
free from accepted constraints—in his case, family,
religion, and country. Dedalus desires to be more,
to be great. Indeed, at the conclusion of Portrait he
presents himself as his namesake (Daedalus).
Other modern texts also highlight figures with
conflicting desires. In Arthur Miller’s death^ oF^
a saLesMan, Willie Loman struggles with his failure
to achieve what he perceives as the modern, post-
World War II version of the American dream,
defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the
ideal that every citizen of the United States should
have an equal opportunity to achieve success and
prosperity through hard work, determination, and
initiative.” In short, Willie’s ambition was to achieve
success through owning his own business and mak-
ing as much money as possible. But it is Willie’s
ambition—or lack thereof—that makes the play an
intriguing look at how ambition can affect our lives.
An earlier text, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The
Great Gatsby, revolves around the misunderstand-
ing of the main character, Jay Gatsby, whose business
success during the Roaring Twenties was probably
caused by his ambition to achieve the American
dream, to “do better” than his modest beginnings
seemed to allow him to do. Gatsby’s rise in power
and acquisition of wealth stand in stark contrast to
Willie Loman’s failure to attain any of these things.
Both characters, however, seem uncomfortable with
their ambition and its consequences, remaining
conflicted characters throughout the telling of their
respective tales.
In Achebe’s Things Fall Apart we are presented
with yet another example of a conflicted character
and how the consequences of ambition can lead to
ruin. In this case, Okonkwo (the main character)
struggles with the past and the present, old cultural
norms and new cultural norms, as British colonial-
ism introduces itself to his home village in Nigeria,
Africa. Okonkwo’s misguided ambition proves to be
his downfall, likening Things Fall Apart to some of
the Greek tragedies.
In modern society and literature, ambition is no
longer presented as a human struggle with gods (at
least not solely) but as a struggle within the indi-
vidual. However, while ambition has always been an
internal struggle between an “honorable” approach
or a “dishonorable” approach to a situation, our
modern, globalized world presents new layers to this
theme. Individuals no longer struggle only within
themselves: They also struggle to understand how
their ambition can—and should—be acted upon
in a society that has new means of waging warfare,
merging cultures, free-market economies, and evolv-
ing forms of communication. In such a world, ambi-
tion does not always need to be a tragic flaw. After
all, without ambition the United States would not
have pushed westward, eventually spreading from
the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Without ambi-
tion, the world would not have achieved spaceflight,
prompting new questions and new discoveries.
Without ambition, we would not have the wealth
of knowledge available to us through the Internet.
Without ambition we would not have had the Civil
Rights movement. However, without ambition we
also would not have had the Holocaust, the Water-ambition 7