Essays 61 - 90
to the gods, who always punish it. And that is a second theme of the play, the folly of pride. By refusing to accept his own acti...
all the necessary stages in that development would be as futile as Oedipuss attempts to challenge the Fates....
woman who was now a widow, he fell in love and married her-his mother (Sophocles). Apollo curses Thebes and says that the city wil...
hard we try to turn it aside. As far as ironic speeches, the play is full of them, but two that we can consider are at lines 59-6...
"Oedipus the King" (The Classics Pages: Antigone). Before Oedipus came onto the scene it seems that Creon may well have had a ch...
is true that Greek culture allowed infanticide via death by exposure, this custom was typically reserved for girls and babies with...
the law. It would be an impossibility, no matter what the prediction, that this would happen. However, in the case of Oedipus, he ...
watch these plays we see not only human frailty, but the workings of fate. Consider Oedipus: he killed his father and married his ...
a man who has a prophecy following him, and he is a man who is relatively clueless about what is going on. He inadvertently kills ...
as though by filming this story in this manner the producer was trying to invite, so to speak, the audience into a theater, make t...
have to hear; and he ends up discovering the truth about himself, a truth so agonizing and abhorrent that he blinds himself (Sopho...
"childhood and neurotic mental processes" (Appel, 1995, p. 625), Freud was able to create a link between family relationships and ...
he is blind than when he sees. "Light, to the ancient Greeks, was beauty, intellect, virtue, indeed represented life itself" (Gree...
in which a drunk calls Oedipus a "bastard," thus forcing him to the extreme of looking for the cause of the plague on the city whe...
consequence. Her grief is obviously great even though the event was decades ago. She tells Oedipus, "...my son/ he wasnt three day...
the way; at the same time, the "old man," who was watching carefully, "struck me from his carriage, / full on the head with his tw...
both royalty, they have both been told by an outside agency to look for a murderer in their midst, and in both cases, the agency t...
on themes that have to do with familial love and altruism, rather than the hostility and fear that were attributed to it by Freud ...
this writer/tutor encourages the student to reread the play, noting passages that support the chosen theme. While certainly study ...
an already contradictory situation. Consider how she acknowledges the baby as both "my son" and as "valuable property." Her matern...
intelligent man, a man of integrity, and a man who is willing to seek answers, even if those answers point to him as the problem. ...
of the Soul Jonathan Lear describes the knowledge someone has regarding something already known as knowingness. This is developed...
deed in this our present trouble, I care not to prolong the span of life, Thus ill-reputed; for the calumny Hits not a single blot...
they can stop the men from going off to war and would ultimately bring some peace. The premise of the story is a tragic one, in th...
a man. She is fighting to ensure that he has a proper burial and she has no thoughts for herself. Ismene simply wants to be a good...
is to preserve the "state," that is the authority of the state, as opposed to having genuine feeling for the welfare of the people...
and queen of Corinth. As a young man, Oedipus heard the prophecy that he would murder his father and marry his mother. Thinking th...
her. Antigone The second question involves characters in the story of Antigone. The characters under discussion are Antig...
In five pages the ways in which characters are utilized by the playwrights as instruments by which the audience can be manipulated...
In five pages fate's role in this ancient Greek tragedy is examined. Three sources are cited in the bibliography....