Romance: Death and Ecstasy

I found a website with a useful comparative chart of the stages of each mythos from Frye: romance, tragedy, comedy, and irony & satire. His discussion of each then receives its own page. My group's presentation is on Romance.

In seemingly unrelated thoughts, I read Yukio Mishima's short story, "Patriotism," last night and was struck by the feeling of myth which pervaded it. "Patriotism" tells the story of the ritual suicide of a young military man, Shinji, and his wife, Reiko. My initial thought was to place it in the realm of tragedy, but now I am reconsidering. Although it ends in two deaths, the deaths are meant to keep the couple together, and are shown as honorable, worthy of respect, admiration, and even celebration, like marriage is in romance or comedy. Purity and propriety are very important to these characters and the reader is shown nothing to suggest any hypocrisy. Shinji has an almost romantic notion of loyalty to empire. If the husband is the hero, then a life without conviction might be the enemy. After looking at the clear descriptions on the above Frye website, I'm thinking now that it might fall more into the realm of irony and satire. After some more thought, I will try to further explicate this. I agree with Charity that it may be important to expand our discussion of archeypal criticism to include examples from outside of the Western tradition. At least if this means of organizing and discussing literature is to be meaningful for me, I would like to see a broader application. If archetypes go beyond Greek and biblical myth, then perhaps they have some origin in humanity. Like I said in my response to Breeman, stories are our way to make sense of life and thereby to make sense of death. Mortality is an essential element of the definition of human.