According to Aristotle, a tragic hero should possess a tragic flaw which is responsible for their downfall. Aristotle also said that a tragic hero's downfall should evoke feelings of pity and fear. Of all the characters in the play, John Proctor seems to fit these criteria more than any other.

John Proctor's tragic flaw is arguably either his honesty or his concern with his reputation. When, at the end of the play, he has an opportunity to save his life by falsely confessing to witchcraft, he refuses. When asked to explain why he will not sign a confession, John Proctor exclaims, "Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life!" As a result of his refusal to confess, John Proctor is tragically hanged.

John Proctor's tragic end certainly is deserving of pity. We pity him because he has been unjustly executed and because he is one of the few consistently honest and honorable characters in the play. It is easy to understand, too, how John Proctor's tragic end might evoke fear. Indeed, we fear for his life in the final act of the play. We might also fear the unthinking mob mentality which hastened John Proctor's demise. Indeed, at the time the play was written, in the early 1950s, a similar mob mentality was playing itself out in the form of the McCarthy trials. Not long before the McCarthy trials, mob mentality had helped the Nazis sweep to power in Germany.

Aristotle defined a tragic hero as a character who makes some kind of error in judgment that leads to his own demise. John Proctor is the protagonist of the play, the leading character, whose life is most closely followed by the story's action. He is the only character who appears in every act of the play, and though many other characters make mistakes, those mistakes do not lead to the characters' own destruction. Therefore, John Proctor is the play's tragic hero. He makes his big mistake when he fails to go to town and share with the court the information that Abigail Williams told him and him alone—that the girls' activities in the forest were "only sport" and that Betty's illness did not have anything to do with witchcraft—before his wife is accused of witchcraft by Abigail, his former lover. His mistake is the result of his pride, his unwillingness to sully his good name and reputation in Salem Village. However, it is also the result of his continuing feelings for Abigail, as Elizabeth points out in the second act. She asks him, "John, if it were not Abigail that you must go to hurt, would you falter now? I think not." In act 1, John himself admits that he still thinks "softly" of Abigail from time to time, and these continuing feelings for her likely prevent him from accusing her before it is too late.

I would say John Proctor because in the end he has to make the decision to give up his friends and his name or live. His mistake was having an affair with Abigail Williams because this influences his behavior for the rest of the play. He and Elizabeth are estranged, and John feels guilt for doing what he did. He spends the whole play feeling guilty and it's not until the end that "He have his goodness", according to Elizabeth. She won't talk him out of hanging because John has made the right decision to deny he's a witch.