The play Oedipus Rex portrays human relations and the importance of friendship and love between people. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is constructed so that readers will become analysts of the cause in the past for a present malaise; they become priests examining the entrails of a story to discover the cause. Sophocles dramatizes the plot and unveils human blindness and egoism.
Thesis
Using the themes of arrogance and blindness, Sophocles unveils the importance of self-identity and the warmth of the heart.
In Oedipus Rex, the protagonist is oblivious to a disaster about to overtake him. The principal character is obsessed with one future, his objective, for instance–while the audience anticipates another. But a still more compelling interest for readers in the future of Oedipus is relishing in the gulling of fools for their wealth, especially because Oedipus uses his own venality to pull their strings and even more especially because readers enjoy the irony that he is only a more cunning version of his victims.
Following Green (1993) “Sophocles’ treatment of blindness … has far greater meaning than that of a symbolically achieved sexual act. Spiritual blindness is equated with obduracy and arrogance–hubris–and towards the end of Oedipus Rex, the physical blinding is already encouraging new insight, awareness, and compassion” (2).
There is little if any prospective force to these motives for readers. Even pleasure in Oedipus’s power to manipulate others has little sustaining power; these gratifications and the prospect of their repetition have no overarching compelling value. Oedipus’s specific desires are not ours; but the fact that our pleasure in him is a guilty one, which readers instinctively want to be reproved and which Nassaar (1997) makes sure becomes increasingly so, creates an increasingly inelastic tension: a countdown clock toward failure. As Oedipus overcomes one test of his wit and ingenuity after the other, at first easily but with greater and greater difficulty, what we most fundamentally anticipate with hope and fear, and he does not, is when Oedipus will overreach himself.
The themes of arrogance and blindness help Sophocles to create an atmosphere of solitude and loneliness. The protagonists are made to search for the cause of the current state of affairs, and it is in their characters that they will persevere until they find the cause in themselves. In the play, the progress of the action is matched by a systematic rediscovery of the past (for Oedipus there is new information from the past) as the forwarding of events in the present makes their past decisions important to them and exciting discoveries for readers.
Following Nassar “Oedipus himself stresses that his daughters always sat beside him at a table and ate from every dish that he ate from, whereas the sons, presumably, sat at a distance and were neglected” (187). The fictional past of a character enters a play dramatically only when its appearance creates perception shifts. More typically, the forward strategies of a play point readers’ engaged anticipation toward an event that is in the future of the fiction, when Oedipus will discover the truth–and in that play, this is also the rediscovery of the fictional past. Oedipus replies:
Children, the god was Apollo.
He brought my sick, sick fate upon me.
But the blinding hand was my own!
How could I bear to see
When all my sight was horror everywhere? (Sophocles 72; 31-39)
In this scene, Sophocles portrays that the significant dramatic future is not the event readers have been pointed to but the discovery of the imaginative implications, the experience, of the whole action. That experience is the particular goal of the retrospective strategies, which, in contrast to the linear perspectives of the prospective strategies, are impressionistic, surreal, and primitive, the connectives associational, emotional, and metaphorical.
The ultimate goal of the theme of arrogance and blindness is not the event that precipitates the climax but what follows that event, the perceptual climax itself: these strategies invisibly prepare the spectator’s memory and imagination so that the events onstage will become causes for experiences in the auditorium. “Tragic drama focuses on “the will to supplement or displace a dominant presence even in its absence”, a need to replace an absent father with a present son” (Rosefeldt 117).
These are the insidious strategies that get inside our skins and teach our pulses to beat their time. But in Oedipus Rex, the images of the self-made King and the God-appointed prophet have especial depth and extension: here human intellect epitomized and reason itself are pitted against the very being of the supernatural and mysterious; clear-cut, understandable human motivations are confronted by dark, frighteningly grotesque, complex, and incomprehensible designs.
In sum, using the themes of arrogance and blindness, Sophocles creates a story conflict and appeals to the emotions of readers through vivid and impressive images of the characters and their inner feelings. The characters are explicit and the consequences of the motives and decisions of the protagonist are clearly foreseen; therefore, following the catastrophe the narrator Sophocles ends the play by setting the events into a wider context that was not so apparent, Sophocles creates the view from the bridge to a mythic dimension and, most especially, to a presumably eternal principle of retributive justice that he says runs deeper than social legislation.
Works Cited
- Green, J. M. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. The Explicator, 52, 1993, 2-4.
- Nassaar, Ch., S. Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. The Explicator, 55, 1997, 187-189.
- Rosefeldt, P. From Strange Interlude to Strange Snow: A Study of the Absent Character in Drama. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 2002, 117.
- Sophocles, Oedipus Rex. 2006. Web.