Blurred Lines In Antigone

After I read pages twenty through thirty of Jean Anouilh’s play, Antigone, but before the interactive oral, I deemed Antigone the Tragic Hero—she fulfills many of the criterion. Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus, thus she is of noble birth. In an act of heroism, Antigone challenges Creon’s totalitarian state. Antigone’s fate was predestined; the Chorus declares that Antigone is going to die. I did not think there could be an affirmative case for any other character. During the interactive oral, one cultural and contextual consideration that was discussed was the philosophy of blurred lines with respect to the Tragic Hero’s identity. My attention was drawn to the fact that Creon also manifests many of the Tragic Hero’s criterion. The audience sympathizes
By contrast, Antigone does not elicit much sympathy, due to her lack of sadness and self-pity. Addedly, Creon fulfills the three elements of tragedy: peripeteia occurs when he recants the proffer to look past Antigone’s civil disobedience, anagnorisis when he discovers that his actions triggered the three suicides, and the “scene of suffering” when he exiles himself from Thebes. Antigone does not. Therefrom, it seems that both Antigone and Creon could be deemed the Tragic Hero. Anouilh’s cultural background alludes to a plausible reason for this blurring of lines. Anouilh penned Antigone in 1942 while living in Vichy France. Many read the play as having a strong anti-Nazi sentiment; Anouilh was seemingly inspired by an act of resistance during the Occupation. Conversely, some critics saw Anouilh as a Nazi sympathizer because he refused to takes sides. A parallel can be drawn