In James Peck’s essay, he reexamines the “9.11” event from a different perspective by perceiving it as a tragedy play. Taking advantage of his professional knowledge in theater, Peck introduces his method of understanding this catastrophe and contrasts it with the melodrama Americans are obsessed with. Given that these two notions all come from theater, Peck also implicitly suggests to the audience that theatrical method of reading tragedy and genres alike can also be practiced in analyzing and understanding real life events. At the very beginning of this article, Peck recalls the moment when he just heard of 9.11. The image depicted here is that Peck urgently wants to read an ancient tragedy. Getting to know the death and injury of thousands of people, he takes tragedy play as a relief. However, through this exploration, he finds tragedy a useful tool to comprehend reality. Tragedy, according to the essay, “is above all a genre of suffering and witness” (741). This genre of theater study does show the audience all the torture and pains inflicted on a certain group of subjects. However, the essence of tragedy is not calling for “easy resolution” (741). Rather, by reading a tragedy, Peck suggests that we shall take a difficult path to fathom ourselves and to find the hope beneath the ruin. The aforementioned strategy to fully appreciate a tragedy is also applied to the “9.11” event by Peck. In tragedy, we feel sad for the suffering group. In this catastrophe, Americans should also mourn for the dead. America will also pursue the terrorists constantly, just like tragedy play punishes “those who inflict sufferings, in order to hold to or advance an idea” (742). Moreover, the readers cannot omit the significance of self-recognition in that it helps to identify the underlying reason for the tragedy. Likewise, Americans shall look back and seek for the primary reason