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Analysis of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 27, 2020 • ( 0 )

The place of the Oedipus Tyrannus in literature is something like that of the Mona Lisa in art. Everyone knows the story, the first detective story of Western literature; everyone who has read or seen it is drawn into its enigmas and moral dilemmas. It presents a kind of nightmare vision of a world suddenly turned upside down: a decent man discovers that he has unknowingly killed his father, married his mother, and sired children by her. It is a story that, as Aristotle says in the Poetics , makes one shudder with horror and feel pity just on hearing it. In Sophocles’ hands, however, this ancient tale becomes a profound meditation on the questions of guilt and responsibility, the order (or disorder) of our world, and the nature of man. The play stands with the Book of Job, Hamlet, and King Lear as one of Western literature’s most searching examinations of the problem of suffering.

—Charles Segal, Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge

No other drama has exerted a longer or stronger hold on the imagination than Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (also known as Oedipus Tyrannus or Oedipus Rex ). Tragic drama that is centered on the dilemma of a single central character largely begins with Sophocles and is exemplified by his Oedipus, arguably the most influential play ever written. The most famous of all Greek dramas, Sophocles’ play, supported by Aristotle in the Poetics, set the standard by which tragedy has been measured for nearly two-and-a-half millennia. For Aristotle, Sophocles’ play featured the ideal tragic hero in Oedipus, a man of “great repute and good fortune,” whose fall, coming from his horrifying discovery that he has killed his father and married his mother, is masterfully arranged to elicit tragedy’s proper cathartic mixture of pity and terror. The play’s relentless exploration of human nature, destiny, and suffering turns an ancient tale of a man’s shocking history into one of the core human myths. Oedipus thereby joins a select group of fictional characters, including Odysseus, Faust, Don Juan, and Don Quixote, that have entered our collective consciousness as paradigms of humanity and the human condition. As classical scholar Bernard Knox has argued, “Sophocles’ Oedipus is not only the greatest creation of a major poet and the classic representative figure of his age: he is also one of a long series of tragic protagonists who stand as symbols of human aspiration and despair before the characteristic dilemma of Western civilization—the problem of man’s true stature, his proper place in the universe.”

For nearly 2,500 years Sophocles’ play has claimed consideration as drama’s most perfect and most profound achievement. Julius Caesar wrote an adaptation; Nero allegedly acted the part of the blind Oedipus. First staged in a European theater in 1585, Oedipus has been continually performed ever since and reworked by such dramatists as Pierre Corneille, John Dryden, Voltaire, William Butler Yeats, André Gide, and Jean Cocteau. The French neoclassical tragedian Jean Racine asserted that Oedipus was the ideal tragedy, while D. H. Lawrence regarded it as “the finest drama of all time.” Sigmund Freud discovered in the play the key to understanding man’s deepest and most repressed sexual and aggressive impulses, and the so-called Oedipus complex became one of the founding myths of psychoanalysis. Oedipus has served as a crucial mirror by which each subsequent era has been able to see its own reflection and its understanding of the mystery of human existence.

If Aeschylus is most often seen as the great originator of ancient Greek tragedy and Euripides is viewed as the great outsider and iconoclast, it is Sophocles who occupies the central position as classical tragedy’s technical master and the age’s representative figure over a lifetime that coincided with the rise and fall of Athens’s greatness as a political and cultural power in the fifth century b.c. Sophocles was born in 496 near Athens in Colonus, the legendary final resting place of the exiled Oedipus. At the age of 16, Sophocles, an accomplished dancer and lyre player, was selected to lead the celebration of the victory over the Persians at the battle of Salamis, the event that ushered in Athens’s golden age. He died in 406, two years before Athens’s fall to Sparta, which ended nearly a century of Athenian supremacy and cultural achievement. Very much at the center of Athenian public life, Sophocles served as a treasurer of state and a diplomat and was twice elected as a general. A lay priest in the cult of a local deity, Sophocles also founded a literary association and was an intimate of such prominent men of letters as Ion of Chios, Herodotus, and Archelaus. Urbane, garrulous, and witty, Sophocles was remembered fondly by his contemporaries as possessing all the admired qualities of balance and tranquillity. Nicknamed “the Bee” for his “honeyed” style of fl owing eloquence—the highest compliment the Greeks could bestow on a poet or speaker—Sophocles was regarded as the tragic Homer.

In marked contrast to his secure and stable public role and private life, Sophocles’ plays orchestrate a disturbing challenge to assurance and certainty by pitting vulnerable and fallible humanity against the inexorable forces of nature and destiny. Sophocles began his career as a playwright in 468 b.c. with a first-prize victory over Aeschylus in the Great, or City, Dionysia, the annual Athenian drama competition. Over the next 60 years he produced more than 120 plays (only seven have survived intact), winning first prize at the Dionysia 24 times and never earning less than second place, making him unquestionably the most successful and popular playwright of his time. It is Sophocles who introduced the third speaking actor to classical drama, creating the more complex dramatic situations and deepened psychological penetration through interpersonal relationships and dialogue. “Sophocles turned tragedy inward upon the principal actors,” classicist Richard Lattimore has observed, “and drama becomes drama of character.” Favoring dramatic action over narration, Sophocles brought offstage action onto the stage, emphasized dialogue rather than lengthy, undramatic monologues, and purportedly introduced painted scenery. Also of note, Sophocles replaced the connected trilogies of Aeschylus with self-contained plays on different subjects at the same contest, establishing the norm that has continued in Western drama with its emphasis on the intensity and unity of dramatic action. At their core, Sophocles’ tragedies are essentially moral and religious dramas pitting the tragic hero against unalterable fate as defined by universal laws, particular circumstances, and individual temperament. By testing his characters so severely, Sophocles orchestrated adversity into revelations that continue to evoke an audience’s capacity for wonder and compassion.

The story of Oedipus was part of a Theban cycle of legends that was second only to the stories surrounding the Trojan War as a popular subject for Greek literary treatment. Thirteen different Greek dramatists, including Aeschylus and Euripides, are known to have written plays on the subject of Oedipus and his progeny. Sophocles’ great innovation was to turn Oedipus’s horrifying circumstances into a drama of self-discovery that probes the mystery of selfhood and human destiny.

The play opens with Oedipus secure and respected as the capable ruler of Thebes having solved the riddle of the Sphinx and gained the throne and Thebes’s widowed queen, Jocasta, as his reward. Plague now besets the city, and Oedipus comes to Thebes’s rescue once again when, after learning from the oracle of Apollo that the plague is a punishment for the murder of his predecessor, Laius, he swears to discover and bring the murderer to justice. The play, therefore, begins as a detective story, with the key question “Who killed Laius?” as the initial mystery. Oedipus initiates the first in a seemingly inexhaustible series of dramatic ironies as the detective who turns out to be his own quarry. Oedipus’s judgment of banishment for Laius’s murderer seals his own fate. Pledged to restore Thebes to health, Oedipus is in fact the source of its affliction. Oedipus’s success in discovering Laius’s murderer will be his own undoing, and the seemingly percipient, riddle-solving Oedipus will only see the truth about himself when he is blind. To underscore this point, the blind seer Teiresias is summoned. He is reluctant to tell what he knows, but Oedipus is adamant: “No man, no place, nothing will escape my gaze. / I will not stop until I know it all.” Finally goaded by Oedipus to reveal that Oedipus himself is “the killer you’re searching for” and the plague that afflicts Thebes, Teiresias introduces the play’s second mystery, “Who is Oedipus?”

You have eyes to see with, But you do not see yourself, you do not see The horror shadowing every step of your life, . . . Who are your father and mother? Can you tell me?

Oedipus rejects Teiresias’s horrifying answer to this question—that Oedipus has killed his own father and has become a “sower of seed where your father has sowed”—as part of a conspiracy with Jocasta’s brother Creon against his rule. In his treatment of Teiresias and his subsequent condemning of Creon to death, Oedipus exposes his pride, wrath, and rush to judgment, character flaws that alloy his evident strengths of relentless determination to learn the truth and fortitude in bearing the consequences. Jocasta comes to her brother’s defense, while arguing that not all oracles can be believed. By relating the circumstances of Laius’s death, Jocasta attempts to demonstrate that Oedipus could not be the murderer while ironically providing Oedipus with the details that help to prove the case of his culpability. In what is a marvel of ironic plot construction, each step forward in answering the questions surrounding the murder and Oedipus’s parentage takes Oedipus a step back in time toward full disclosure and self-discovery.

As Oedipus is made to shift from self-righteous authority to doubt, a messenger from Corinth arrives with news that Oedipus’s supposed father, Poly-bus, is dead. This intelligence seems again to disprove the oracle that Oedipus is fated to kill his father. Oedipus, however, still is reluctant to return home for fear that he could still marry his mother. To relieve Oedipus’s anxiety, the messenger reveals that he himself brought Oedipus as an infant to Polybus. Like Jocasta whose evidence in support of Oedipus’s innocence turns into confirmation of his guilt, the messenger provides intelligence that will connect Oedipus to both Laius and Jocasta as their son and as his father’s killer. The messenger’s intelligence produces the crucial recognition for Jocasta, who urges Oedipus to cease any further inquiry. Oedipus, however, persists, summoning the herdsman who gave the infant to the messenger and was coincidentally the sole survivor of the attack on Laius. The herdsman’s eventual confirmation of both the facts of Oedipus’s birth and Laius’s murder produces the play’s staggering climax. Aristotle would cite Sophocles’ simultaneous con-junction of Oedipus’s recognition of his identity and guilt with his reversal of fortune—condemned by his own words to banishment and exile as Laius’s murderer—as the ideal artful arrangement of a drama’s plot to produce the desired cathartic pity and terror.

The play concludes with an emphasis on what Oedipus will now do after he knows the truth. No tragic hero has fallen further or faster than in the real time of Sophocles’ drama in which the time elapsed in the play coincides with the performance time. Oedipus is stripped of every illusion of his authority, control, righteousness, and past wisdom and is forced to contend with a shame that is impossible to expiate—patricide and incestual relations with his mother—in a world lacking either justice or alleviation from suffering. Oedipus’s heroic grandeur, however, grows in his diminishment. Fundamentally a victim of circumstances, innocent of intentional sin whose fate was preordained before his birth, Oedipus refuses the consolation of blamelessness that victimization confers, accepting in full his guilt and self-imposed sentence as an outcast, criminal, and sinner. He blinds himself to confirm the moral shame that his actions, unwittingly or not, have provoked. It is Oedipus’s capacity to endure the revelation of his sin, his nature, and his fate that dominates the play’s conclusion. Oedipus’s greatest strengths—his determination to know the truth and to accept what he learns—sets him apart as one of the most pitiable and admired of tragic heroes. “The closing note of the tragedy,” Knox argues, “is a renewed insistence on the heroic nature of Oedipus; the play ends as it began, with the greatness of the hero. But it is a different kind of greatness. It is now based on knowledge, not, as before on ignorance.” The now-blinded Oedipus has been forced to see and experience the impermanence of good fortune, the reality of unimaginable moral shame, and a cosmic order that is either perverse in its calculated cruelty or chaotically random in its designs, in either case defeating any human need for justice and mercy.

The Chorus summarizes the harsh lesson of heroic defeat that the play so majestically dramatizes:

Look and learn all citizens of Thebes. This is Oedipus. He, who read the famous riddle, and we hailed chief of men, All envied his power, glory, and good fortune. Now upon his head the sea of disaster crashes down. Mortality is man’s burden. Keep your eyes fixed on your last day. Call no man happy until he reaches it, and finds rest from suffering.

Few plays have dealt so unflinchingly with existential truths or have as bravely defined human heroism in the capacity to see, suffer, and endure.

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Blindness in Oedipus Rex & Hamlet Research Paper

Introduction, blindness in oedipus rex, oedipus the king: summary, blindness in hamlet, hamlet’s blindness and its impact on his judgement, blindness in oedipus rex & hamlet: conclusion, works cited.

In literature, writers use different literary elements to expound their work. In Sophocles’ Oedipus (the initial name of the play is Oedipus Tyrannus) and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, blindness is deeply explored. People may be physically blind wherein they cannot see their surroundings; on the other hand, people may have physical sight but be ‘blind’ towards truth or reality.

Interestingly, those with physical blindness, in many cases have a special gift of seeing invisible things that those sighted cannot see. In most cases, physically blind can see future events. Ironically, sighted people are in most cases “blind” to the future or the realities and truths of the present. This paper aims at researching blindness in Oedipus Rex and Hamlet as there are both physical blindness and inability to see and accept the truth amongst the sighted. Thus, there are two types of blindness, figurative and literal.

The theme of blindness in Oedipus Rex is one of the main tragedy’s underlying themes. As aforementioned, the play by Sophocles explores blindness from two angles, physical blindness and inability to see the truth for the sighted. Teiresias is physically blind and happens to be a prophet; he stands for truth. On the other hand, king Oedipus is sighted; however, he cannot see the truth as the play starts even though he makes himself physically blind as the play ends. Similarly, Jocasta is physically sighted but blind to the truth. Even after knowing the truth, she deliberately rejects it.

Therefore, in this play, the sighted like Oedipus and Jocasta are ‘blind’ to the truth whilst the blind like Teiresias can see the truth. Physical sight comes at the expense of truth whilst knowing the truth comes at the expense of sight. Oedipus confirms this when he gouges his eyes after knowing the truth. It appears that truth and physical sight cannot coexist. Nevertheless, King Oedipus is the biggest victim of ‘truth’ blindness, which is used as the symbol of escaping and refusal to admit the reality.

As the play opens, Oedipus is doomed to tragedy. His life starts on a bad note after a prophecy reveals that he would marry his mother after killing his father. “An oracle foretold that the child born to him by his queen Jocasta would slay his father and wed his mother” (Johnston 2). However, his parents, Laius and Jocasta, are metaphorically blind to this truth and to escape reality, they deport him to mountains where they hope Oedipus will die hence nullify this prophecy.

Luckily, for Oedipus, a shepherd rescues him and takes him to Polybus and Merope for adoption. After Oedipus discovers his prophecy, he escapes from his adopted parents thinking they are his true parents. Unfortunately, on his way, he meets his real father, Laius, and kills him instantly. Oedipus then goes on to become king of Thebes. It is in his capacity as the king that he marries only to realize later that he married his own mother.

The theme of fate and free will develops as the prophecy is fulfilled; ignoring the facts does not change them. As time goes on, a tragedy strikes Thebes, and Oedipus consults Teiresias, the blind prophet who notes that the Theban woes come from a polluter within the Kingdom. Ironically, Teiresias notes, “…Thou the accursed polluter of this land” (Sophocles Para. 45). The king is the polluter. Oedipus’blindness comes out clearly at this point as he refuses to accept this truth.

Oedipus cannot contain such an oracle. He says, “Vile slanderer, thou blurtest forth these taunts” (Sophocles Para. 46). This heralds more ‘blindness’ towards the truth. He learns the truth, and that is why he decides to blind himself; Oedipus Rex stabs his eyes out and becomes physically blind. From this short synopsis, it is true that Oedipus is blind in many ways.

First, he is blind to the fact that Polybus and Merope were not his real parents, Laius and Jocasta were. He was so blind that he could not withstand anyone claiming that Laius and Jocasta are his parents (Bates Para. 6).

Some critics argue that this is not blindness because Oedipus did not know. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Oedipus is blind, for he cannot see the truth. It does not matter whether he knew and ignored the truth or not, he could not see or realize the truth, hence blind. As the play rolls on, Oedipus starts realizing the truth, and finally, it dawns on him that he is the polluter.

The character of Oedipus is clearly seen when he realizes that he killed Laius, his father, and married Jocasta, his mother, and this is the genesis of Thebes’ problems. As this dawns on him and truth takes precedence, he takes away his sight. This explains why physical sight does not coexist with acknowledgment of truth in this play. Oedipus’ physical blindness is of great significance in this play.

This play is a Greek tragedy and every Greek tragedy “was supposed to end with the main characters experiencing their own personal tragedy” (Foster, 111). Oedipus’ physical blindness signifies his personal tragedy as part of this Greek tragedy. In discovering the truth and the eventual physical blindness, this Greek tragedy comes to fulfillment.

According to Dawe, this act was to confirm Teiresias’ prophecy that Oedipus came to Thebes as a sighted man but would leave it as a blind man (3). Oedipus’ physical blindness restores his sight for the truth. By keeping him away from seeing his sins and mistakes, physical blindness gives Oedipus time to reflect on what he has done, how it connects to Teiresias’ words and knows the truth. In physical blindness, Oedipus has time to reflect on Laius’ death, Jocasta’s marriage, and other things that he has done in life.

Nevertheless, Oedipus’ two forms of blindness are connected. His physical blindness, the result of an act of weakness, causes him pain, just like his previous blindness to the truth. First, the physical pain he inflicts on himself is so great, just like the pain he is causing himself due to his inability to see the truth. Jocasta, on her part, has sight, and she knows the truth; however, she deliberately chooses to ignore it.

Another example of blindness is Jocasta’s knowledge of the truth about Oedipus’ prophecy; however, she thinks and believes that he is dead. Even though at first she does not know that, her new husband is her son Oedipus, after realizing it, she chooses to ignore it altogether. This is blindness to the truth. After realizing that she has participated in the whole saga, she dismisses the entire issue as ‘hoax.’ Nevertheless, she falls into another form of blindness viz. eternal blindness.

Upon realization that the prophecy about Oedipus has happened, she chooses to kill herself; therefore, she enters into eternal blindness. “Jocasta’s blindness eventually led to her disgrace” (Bates Para. 14). In death, she cannot see or make choices. The symbolism of blindness continues to unveil, just as Oedipus loses his sight after knowing and acknowledging the truth, Jocasta loses her life after admitting the truth. At the end, Oedipus gets banished from kingdom, which becomes his final punishment.He places curses on his two sons and leaves.

On his part, Teiresias is physically blind; he cannot see his surrounding; however, he can see into the future and link it to the past. His physical blindness presents him with the gift of having visions. Due to this gift, he knows that Oedipus is the polluter of Thebes. He knows that Oedipus killed Laius, and Jocasta is Oedipus’ mother. Sophocles sought to insinuate that when it comes to knowing and acknowledging the truth, the sighted have no advantage over the physically blind.

The sighted Oedipus characters can see everything else except truth; the physically blind can see nothing else except the truth. Even after knowing the truth, people have the tendency to ignore it; however, as aforementioned, ignoring the facts does not change them. This truth dawns on Jocasta as she realizes she cannot overlook the truth anymore; death is the only secure way out, unfortunately. Thus, the acute theme of sight vs blindness in Oedipus the King is displayed throughout the whole play.

The characters in this play are blind to the truth. Shakespeare emphasizes on sight and blindness. As the play opens, issues pertaining sight dominate the scenes “Look where it comes again… Looks like not the king… See it stalks away” (Shakespeare Para. 6-9).

Interestingly, despite the fact that these characters are emphasizing on seeing, they act blindly. For instance, Horatio refuses to agree to what cannot be asserted until he sees with his eyes something that he fails to accomplish. Throughout the play, many characters are seeing but cannot see the truth. Nevertheless, the most affected character in failure to see the truth is Hamlet.

Due to his afflictions coupled with melancholy, Hamlet cannot see the truth or reality though he is physically sighted. This element makes him, “to be the more exact and curious in pondering the very moments of things” (Bright 99).

Hamlet’s ‘blindness’ makes him pretend to establish the absolute truth behind every truth, something that obsesses him and fools him into thinking he can perform an ocular test on everything to determine the absolute truth in every truth. The desire to establish the absolute truth through visual tests passes as Hamlet’s blindness, and this leads him to inactivity on many occasions.

After Claudius’ murders his father, hamlet fails to avenge this death because he cannot find empirical evidence to prove Claudius guilty. Many scholars have branded Hamlet, “a man without eyelids – unwilling to see, yet unable to close his eyes” (Aronson 415). Actually, it appears that Hamlet is eyeless.

This comes out clearly, after Ophelia meets him and concludes, “Hamlet seems to find his way without his eyes” (Shakespeare Para. 99). This statement points out clearly to the nature of Hamlet. He does not seem to see with his physical eyes; on the contrary, it appears that he uses the eye of his’ mind’ to see. This is true, not regarding the fact that he continually claims to use his physical eyes. He is merely obsessed with establishing visual proofs through his “mind’s eye” (Shakespeare Para. 201).

This obsession enslaves his physical eyes to the mind’s eye, for he cannot ascertain anything through his physical eyes without letting it pass through the ocular test of his mind’s eye. Therefore, in principle, Hamlet is physically blind. Those who cannot see using their physical eyes have no advantage over those who cannot see at all. Hamlet falls in this category, though he has eyes, he cannot see sufficing his blindness.

As the play closes down, it is apparent that Hamlet has lost a considerable amount of his sight. Nevertheless, Shakespeare sought to expose another form of blindness.

According to Hoy, as the play opens, Hamlet possesses sound judgment with proper knowledge of what can hinder someone from making sound decisions (214). He says, “Seems, madam? Nay, it is . I know not ‘seems/’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good-mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Together with all forms, moods, shows of grief, That can denote me truly.

These indeed ‘seem,’ for they are actions that a man might play, But I have that within which passeth show –, these but the trappings and the suits of woe” (Shakespeare Para. 21-6). From this conversation, it is clear that Hamlet can tell what ‘seems’ from what ‘is.’ What ‘seems’ can be true or false; however, what ‘is’ remains the reality; the truth. Something, therefore, must have gone wrong for this prince to lose this insight of differentiating truth from illusion.

Hamlet’s meeting with the ghost can explain the emergence of this sudden blindness in making judgments. The ghost points out that Hamlet is “by a brother’s hand, of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatched…sleeping within his orchard…that one may smile and smile and be a villain” 59-109).

These utterances change Hamlet’s ability to see physically. According to Greenblatt, the ghost makes Hamlet realize his external state is not a direct reflection of his internal self, and this sets him on the path of proving everything he sees to make sure it complies with what he knows (98). He wants to unite the external with the internal, and this marks the end of the usefulness of his eyes, thus becoming ‘blind.’

This blindness robs his judgment; for instance, he can see the picture of his dead father in his mind, and he cannot believe it when a friend tells him that he saw Hamlet’s father the previous night. He does not differentiate between mental images and reality. He takes what he sees in his mind’s eye to be the truth.

For instance, he is convinced that his father is living in the form of a ghost even before he sees the ghost because, in his mind’s eye, he has already seen the ghost. Therefore, this mind’s eye continually replaces his physical eyes, and instead of using his physical eyes to make a judgment, he relies on this mind’s eye, thus making his physical eyes useless hence, blind. As aforementioned, there are some instances when Hamlet portrays his blindness by preferring his mind’s eye to his physical eyes.

In probing his father’s death to establish Claudius’ guilt, he stages a show whereby, “players / Play something like the murder of his father” (Shakespeare Para. 361-3). In this play, he hopes that his uncle will appear suspicious, thus betray him for murdering Hamlet’s father. This is inconsequential as Hamlet fails utterly in his bid to prove Claudius’ guilt empirically.

He deceptively thinks that the inside is connected to the outside and hopes that Claudius would bring forth that which is hidden in the inside. This does not happen; nevertheless, the issue of blindness comes out clearly, because Hamlet cannot see the reality. He even doubts his sight, and he calls Horatio to observe how Claudius behaves during the play. Shakespeare uses this element deliberately to show that even though people have sight, they misuse it on many occasions, for they see what they want to see, not the reality.

Finally, Hamlet’s inability to see the reality comes out clearly in scene three of the play. Even though he sees Claudius kneeling down to pray and asks for forgiveness of his sins of killing Hamlet’s father, he chooses to reflect on the issue and concludes that Claudius cannot be killed at that moment.

Aronson points out, “to see is to perceive evil just as not to see is to be at the mercy of evil” (424). Hamlet refuses to see because he cannot see evil in Claudius, for he cannot prove him guilty. Therefore, his sight becomes only useful in seeing evil, otherwise, he does not see. “Although the prince exhibits an intense preoccupation with establishing visual proof of his uncle’s guilt, he is the equal of a man without eyes since he is unable to truly see” (Byrne Para. 9).

The theme of physical blindness and blindness to truth comes out clearly in the plays Oedipus the King and Hamlet. Oedipus cannot see the truth. He does not know his true parents, marries his mother, and kills his father because of this blindness. After gaining sight of ‘truth,’ he gouges his eyes, becoming physically blind.

Jocasta, on her part, knows the truth but chooses to ‘blind’ herself towards the same; she kills herself as a result. Teiresias is physically blind, but he can see the truth, which is the paradox of blindness. In Hamlet, Hamlet can see, but he chooses to use his mind’s eye instead of his physical eyes. Consequently, his physical eyes become useless, thus becoming blind. Sighted people can choose to be blind to the truth and reality.

Aronson, Alex. “Shakespeare and the Ocular Proof.” Shakespeare Quarterly, 1970. 21(1) 411-29.

Bates, Alfred. “ Oedipus the King .” Three Plays of the Absurd. Web.

Byrne, Tammy. “Hamlet and the Ocular Proof.” Web.

Dawe, Reid. ed. “Sophocles: Oedipus Rex.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Foster, Thomas. “How to Read Literature Like a Professor.” New York: HarperCollins 2003.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Introduction; The Norton Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1997.

Hoy, Cyrus, ed. “Hamlet: An Authoritative Text, Intellectual Backgrounds, Extracts From The Sources, Essays in Criticism.” New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1963.

Johnston, Ian, ed. “Oedipus the King.” Virginia, Richer Resources Publications, 2007.

Shakespeare, William. “ The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark .” Web.

Sophocles. “Oedipus the King.” Athenaeum Library of Philosophy. Web.

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• Gregor's Relationship With His Father in "The Matamorphosis"
• "Frankenstein" vs. "Great Expectations": Compare and Contrast
• Morality and Moral Responsibility as Presented in Plays by Brecht and Kushner
• Symbolism in "The Birthmark" & “The Minister’s Black Veil”

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Creative Reflective Essay: Oedipus Rex

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The American Journal of Psychoanalysis

benjamin kilborne

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Symbolae Philologorum Posnaniensium Graecae et Latinae

Elżbieta Wesołowska

The author of Oedipus Rex manages to reconstruct the hero’s life path against the background of the map of Greece of his day. In doing so he constructs the imaginary of the protagonist’s identity, one that is inextricably linked to his mental blindness as opposed to the tragic, self-inflicted blindness meted out to himself as a punishment for his crimes.

Ubiquity Proceedings

Charlotte Parkyn

The tragedies of fifth-century Athens have frequently been used as a mouthpiece for social commentary. It is a genre that many directors and playwrights, particularly during times of uncertainty, societal change or devastation, have returned to time and again for inspiration. During the Covid-19 pandemic, a number of theatre companies have looked towards the dramas of the ancient Greeks to help their audiences make sense of the worrying and isolating situation they found themselves in. One tragedy in particular seemed most fitting for this collective experience: Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. In this paper, I will explore why this tragedy appealed during the Covid-19 world crisis and how two separate theatre companies - Theater of War Productions, a professional group working in the field of applied drama; and Rickmansworth Players, a small amateur theatre group - used the play to curate cathartic discussions with the communities they engage with.

Md. Roknuzzaman Suruz

The myth of Sophocles's Oedipus Rex is revolved on the three interactive perspectives of fate, truth and self-will, making the play a most remarkable one in the fifth century Greece when all the plays focused on the manifestation of God's will under which man's behavior was undoubtedly directed. What gives the play its tragic intensity is not the horror it arouses of patricide or incest but the meaning of fate that God bestows to Oedipus in his endeavor of truth seeking. What's most important, it is the sentimental self-will of Oedipus that makes the play distinguished from other plays during the age of Sophocles' and makes him an outstanding figure in the fifth century Greek. Though Sophocles' plays could not detach themselves from the influence of religious requirement, namely, the divine will, a theme prevailing during his age, he endeavors to present a comparatively different approach of morality, a refusal to compromise of the hero's fate confined by god in literary works of the fifth century Greece. It seems that Sophocles employs the oracles not for the sake of worshipping the Gods, but rather, for the presentation of man's inner strength seeking truths about the conditions of life or about human character based on truth. Résumé: Le mystère d'Oedipus Rex de Sophocles réside dans les trois perspectives interactives : destin,vérité et entêtement, qui rendent ce drame l'un des plus remarquables du XVe siècle de la Grèce où toutes les pièces se consacraient à manifester la volonté de Dieu par laquelle le comportement de l'homme était incontestablement guidé. Ce qui donne à cette pièce son intensité tragique, ce n'est pas la horreur de parricide ou d'inceste, mais le sens du destin que Dieu accorde à Oedipus dans sa recherche de vérité. Ce qui est le plus important, c'est l'entêtement sentimental d'Oedipus qui distingue cette pièce des autre de l'époque de Sophocles et le rend la plus célèbre figure du XVe siècle de la Grèce. Bien que les pièces de Sophocles ne puissent se détacher de l'influence de la demande religieuse, à savoir la volonté divine-un thème prédominant de l'époque, le dramaturge a cherché à présenter une approche relatively différente de la morale, un refus de faire le compromis sur le destin du héros déterminé par Dieu dans les ouvrages littéraires grecs du XVe siècle. Il semble que Sophocles emploie l'oracle non pour vénérer Dieu, mais pour montrer la force intérieure de l'homme dans la recherche de la vérité sur les conditions de vie ou sur les caractères humains basés sur la vérité. Mots-Clés: destin, recherche de la vérité, entêtement, oracle

Emerging infectious diseases

Sotirios Tsiodras

Sophocles, one of the most noted playwrights of the ancient world, wrote the tragedy Oedipus Rex in the first half of the decade 430–420 bc. A lethal plague is described in this drama. We adopted a critical approach to Oedipus Rex in analyzing the literary description of the disease, unraveling its clinical features, and defining a possible underlying cause. Our goals were to clarify whether the plague described in Oedipus Rex reflects an actual historical event; to compare it with the plague of Athens, which was described by Thucydides as occurring around the same time Sophocles wrote; and to propose a likely causative pathogen. A critical reading of Oedipus Rex and a comparison with Thucydides’ history, as well as a systematic review of historical data, strongly suggests that this epidemic was an actual event, possibly caused by Brucella abortus.

Oedipus Reborn

Tony Thierry Gaillard

More than 14 years of research have led to this new interpretation of the myth of Oedipus. The author shows that Sophocles built his masterpieces on ancient knowledge concerning transgenerational heritages, in reference to the Greek "ate". From Thebes to Colonus, Sophocles relates the rebirth of Oedipus: "this day will see you dying and reborn at once"

International journal of research in English

Bhat Shahid

The current exploration work manages the dramatic ironies which are utilized in the popular Greek tragedy "Oedipus the King" composed by Sophocles. "Oedipus the king" is likewise known by the Latin title "Oedipus Rex" which is an Athenian tragedy by Sophocles and was first acted in 429 B.C. Oedipus Rex Chronicles the tale of Oedipus, a man who turns into the king of Thebes who was predetermined from birth to kill his father Laius and wed his mother Jocasta. The play is an illustration of an exemplary misfortune (tragedy), recognizably containing an accentuation on how Oedipus' own issues add to the deplorable saint's ruin, rather than having destiny be the sole reason. "Oedipus Rex", delivered by Sophocles in the development of his forces, is his show-stopper. Aristotle additionally viewed this play as Sophocles best and he often alluded to it as the ideal kind of shocking arrangement. Its significance lies in the mix of a flawlessly developed plot with the significance understanding into human rationale and condition. In this paper we examined the dramatic ironies of this renowned Greek tragedy.

Israel Muñoz

In approaching this issue, it will be helpful to use two analytically distinct methods, to wit, the diachronic, which allows us to speculate about how the myth reached the hands of Lydgate (Guerin 2005, 183–191); and the synchronic, to clarify the similarities and differences between the two authors. Thus, approaching the subject diachronically, the first pages of this paper will attempt to delineate the main milestones in the long tradition of the myth of Oedipus, beginning from the time of Ancient Rome; and, afterwards, a synchronic analysis will examine various motifs as they have survived, disappeared or been transformed in the medieval poem. The final part will explore the possible reasons for these changes.

Skenè Studies I - 2

Anton Bierl

open access under: https://textsandstudies.skeneproject.it/index.php/TS/catalog/series/Studies-1 chapter 7 https://textsandstudies.skeneproject.it/index.php/TS/catalog/view/67/13/424-1 ABSTRACT Sophocles bases his posthumous Oedipus at Colonus on the famous treatment of the transformation of the Furies to the Kindly Ones in Eumenides, the last play of Aeschylus’ Oresteia that has gained the status of a master-play. Accordingly Sophocles shapes the plot and its main character on a cultic reality and on the ritual concept of chthonic heroes and gods. The Erinyes/Eumenides, to whose grove Oedipus arrives, function as the model for Sophocles’ most questionable hero. Their quintessential polarity between the dreadful dimension of death and euphemistic names to veil it, between mythic scenarios of anger, curse, hate as well as cultic blessing and plenty is the basic pattern of a play that stages Oedipus as a chthonic hero in the making. He acts right from the beginning as the hero he is going to become. Sophocles makes Oedipus oscillate between staging a real mystic miracle and a problematic manipulation of religious facts in order to take revenge on his Theban homeland by finding support from his new city of Athens. This open perspective involves the audience in thinking about what really happened and reflecting about the relation between ritual, religion, politics, and their manipulations by men for their own purposes. In this way it comes quite close to Euripides’ Bacchae written about the same time. OC is thus in many respects like a metatheatrical exploration of the constitutive gap of signifier and signified to be gradually closed by the blind director who gathers, like the blind and unwitting audience, the piecemeal information divulged as the play progresses. KEYWORDS: Oedipus; Sophocles; Erinyes; Eumenides; Oresteia; chthonic polarity; heroization; cultic hero in the making; Kolonos as tumulus; metatheatre; oracles; manipulation; curse; blessing; military support; indeterminacy; narratological strategy; mimesis; politics; mystery; religious and metatheatrical exploration

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Hutton Honors College

Hutton honors seminars, the hero(ine).

Richard Cecil Hutton Honors College

Course Description

This fall we will focus on the qualities that make a person a hero(ine), in the eyes of ancient authors, and compare those qualities with ones we admire today. Beginning with Gilgamesh’s heroic struggle to overcome death, and ending with Satan’s struggle to undermine God’s (according to Milton) plan for mankind, we will read, discuss, and write about ten of the ancient and early modern world’s greatest accounts of heroism. In the final week and a half, we will discuss first-person accounts of heroes written by each of the members of the class.

Written work for the course will consist of daily written discussion questions, three critical discussions of 3-5 pages, and a final 6-10 page creative paper.

Course texts:

• Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey
• Virgil’s Aenead
• Njal’s Saga
• Sophocles’s Antigone & Oedipus Rex
• Seneca’s Trojan Women
• Shakespeare’s Coriolanus &   Hamlet
• Milton’s Paradise Lost

Catalog Information: HHC-H 211  CLASSIC TEXTS, CONTEMPORARY QUESTIONS (I)

About Instructor Richard Cecil

Gened program details.

GenEd Information: Approved for the Arts & Humanities requirement of the IU Bloomington General Education program .