Another aspect that I consider to be crucial is that Citizen Kane contains the elements of great drama, the characters, the structure, the simultaneously fascinating and confounding things you find in Shakespearean tragedies. Shakespeare might have put these characters on stage, and had them push and pull against his lead until the audience started to get some picture of what goes on inside the hero's head. But Shakespeare was a theatrical artist, and Welles, a veteran of theater, reinvents this idea by replacing outward theatrical indicators with subtler cinematic ones. .
The figure of Charles Foster Kane -- like the protagonists in many of Orson Welles' other films -- is a tragic, I'd say Faustian one, wherein idealism and great power give way to hubris and eventual downfall. In characterization, narrative structure, and the functional use of symbolism, Citizen Kane has many similarities with F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, each being a story in which an individual (who is the focus of our attention) is described from afar by a mediating audience surrogate. .
Kane was a powerful man who lost everything, and that fascinates us for the same reason it fascinates the reporters in the film -- we don't understand how it could have happened, how Kane could have fallen so far. He seems to befuddle everyone who knew him, exactly in the mold of most Shakespearean heroes: There was Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, and now there is Charles Foster Kane.
To help us develop the understanding of Kane Welles uses a lot of wonderful techniques. One of the cleverest ones is the breakfast sequence where Kane is having breakfast with his first wife. The scene is repeated over and over. Each take they get older. At first he is very attentive and loving toward his new wife. Then we see them grow increasingly distant toward one another, as Kane becomes less interested in her and increasingly involved in his newspaper.
