Moral Injury as Tragedy: The Tragic Arc as a Narrative Heuristic for Clinical Practice

Moral injury is increasingly recognized as a form of suffering that extends beyond conventional psychiatric models, encompassing moral, existential, and relational dimensions of human experience. Building on Jonathan Shay's seminal use of classical tragedy-particularly Homeric narratives-to conceptualize moral injury as a rupture in moral order and communal trust, this article reframes moral injury through the lens of the tragic narrative arc, offering both an interpretive framework and a clinically useful heuristic. Informed by narrative theory and narrative therapy, the model integrates processes such as externalization, contextual reappraisal, perspective-taking, and re-authoring disrupted identity narratives, without prescribing specific therapeutic techniques. Drawing on structural elements of the tragic arc-hamartia, reversal, recognition, and catharsis-moral injury is conceptualized not as pathology but as a process of moral reckoning shaped by constrained agency, ethical conflict, and irreversible loss. While broadly applicable across clinical and care-oriented disciplines, chaplains are particularly well suited to engage this framework due to their training in moral reflection and existential meaning-making. The model invites empirical evaluation and further development into formal narrative-based interventions.