Is it Tragic? Or Just Sad?

Upon first reading through the text of the play, I found myself thoroughly engrossed in the lives of these fictional characters: They had me clinging to each ornate phrase, urging me forward to the resolution... Until there was none.  I sat and stared at the end of the text with so many questions: What becomes of Chrysothemus?  Does the Tutor tell Orestes how much his mother loved him?  What happens to Electra now that her sole purpose of existence has come to pass? WHERE IS MY KATHARSIS?

...Frankly, I was quite irritated with Sophocles' apparent break from Aristotle's formulae for Greek Tragedy, and I found myself wondering how I would feel at the end of the actual play.

So there I was- the theatre dark, Aegisthus' having bade his penultimate farewells, the chorus' final words lingering on the air- when the play didn't end. Bewildered by this turn of events, with the anxiety creeping further into my stomach, I sat bolt upright in my seat, carefully studying the actions of the only character left still in motion: Electra.

She glided slowly to her mother's corpse, kneeling beside her with what began as smirk of victory, but steadily gave way to grimace of grief...  All at once, she threw her arms over the body, sobs racking her own as her estranged-sister, Chrysothemus, gingerly slid to her side.

...Woah.  Ending where it did, the text of the play provided no realization of the horrors of Electra's fatal flaws: Yet there, on stage, I watched as Electra seemed to recall (and, this time, take heed of) the words of ill-fated Clytemnestra: "A mother may be wronged, but she never learns to hate her child."

With one silent scene, these actors turned Sophocles' Drama into Aristotle's tragedy. Electra realized she had always been the thing she hated, had always loved the thing she'd been, and perhaps never truly hated the thing she now knew she loved: Her mother.  Electra knows Clytemnestra was not the only soul lost in her quest for "justice."