Oedipus Rex And Antigone Research Paper

Professor Pluta
English 1B
5 December 2013
When Pride Leads to Tragedy Pride has forever been seen as a negative characteristic. In the Holy Bible, it is seen as a characteristic of the devil. The devil 's pride led him to the desire to be more powerful than God. As a result, he was expelled from the holy kingdom and sentenced to live among society. That has been a tragedy for humanity because the devil brought all of his evil with him and spread it among the living. It was God 's will to expel him from the heavens and it is now the will of society whether to live as proud as the devil. A character of pride is a person that is arrogant and too stubborn to understand reasoning, so to speak. In the plays Oedipus Rex and Antigone by Sophocles, similar scenarios are present in the way that there are those characters who live with pride and try to prevent the wills of the gods. The one difference in these two plays is that the main characters are of the opposite sex, which readers may conclude
that although women were seemed as inferior to men at that time, some still had the strength to stand up for what they believed in. In the play Oedipus Rex, the audience is aware that there is a prophecy about Oedipus saying that he is to kill his father and marry his mother by the wills of the gods. He does not want to kill his father and marry his mother so he flees the kingdom. Later, his pride does not let him see that he has fulfilled the prophecy. He is too stubborn and thinks that the messenger and Kreon have plotted against him to take his throne as he explains to Teiresias: OEDIPUS: Wealth, power, craft of stemanship! Kingly position, everywhere admired! What savages envy is stored up against these, If Kreon, whom I trusted, Kreon my friend, For this great office which the city once Put in my hands unsought-if for this power Kreon desires in secret to destroy me! (Oedipus scene 1, antistrophe 3, lines 63-69)
He tries not to listen to the wise messenger. Similarly, in the Antigone play, Kreon does not wish to understand the prophecy from the wills of the gods that the messenger has brought him. He stands prideful in his decision of wanting to kill Antigone for her disobedience to his laws. Both characters in the different plays fight the wills of the gods and try to impose their own wills. The one difference in Oedipus Rex and Antigone is that their protagonists, or most important characters, are of the opposite sex. Oedipus is a male and Antigone is a female. That difference is important because at era that these plays were presented, women were perceived as inferior to men. That fact that Antigone was created as the main character even though she was not an active character throughout the play, gives the play the necessary initiation to the action. As a woman, the actions of Antigone stand out more than those of a man. A woman of that time is expected to be submissive and abide to the laws of the state as her sister Ismene says but Antigone 's pride does not allow her to abide by those laws. As a man, it is expected for Oedipus to be strong and prideful as that is a man worthy of the throne of the kingdom of Thebes. The difference in the sex of the main characters give the readers an expectancy of different outcomes, but later it is discovered that the wills of the gods are greater than the wills of the man. Pride may be seen as stubbornness and in these two plays, it is exactly the characters pride that causes the tragedies.
In Oedipus Rex, the pride of Oedipus makes him belief that he will not abide by the rules of the gods, so he flees only to find out later in the play by the messenger that he has fulfilled the prophecy. His pride is also demonstrated when he is on the highway and kills his father. His rage at knowing the prophecy led him to fulfill it; what a tragedy. In the play Antigone, the pride of Creon led to the tragedy of the death of his family. His prideful being decided to give death to Antigone and his son, fiancee of Antiogne, could not tolerate it. The messenger Teresias has advised Creon not to kill Antigone and although he stays strong to his will, in the end he gives in but it turns out to be too late. The prophecy that he would loose his family came true. The messenger returns to the people and says that Haimon, Creon 's son, was
dead: MESSENGER: Haimon is dead; and the had that killed him Is his own hand. CHORAGOS: His father 's? or his own? MESSENGER: His won, driven mad by the murder his father had done. (Antigone exodos, lines 18-21). In the plays Oedipus Rex and Antigone, readers find that there is a difference on the main characters that contributes to the outcome of events. In Oedipus, the main character is himself and he contributes all the events that lead to the tragic ending. Something that would be expected of a male character. A female character is suppose to be submissive and law abiding, but in the play Antigone that was not the case. The main character that is Antigone herself did not certainly cause the tragedy, but she was certainly a great contributor to it. Similar scenarios are present in the two plays in the way that there are those characters who live with pride and try to prevent the wills of the gods. In both situations the pride of the characters leads to tragedy. These plays are worth reading for the reason that they provide a moral lesson for those individuals that think of pride as a positive characteristic and live their lives within that value.

Word Count: 1,039
Works Cited
Sophocles. Gillespie, Sheena, Terezinha Fonseca, and Tony Pipolo. Literature Across Cultures. 5th ed. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2008. Print.
Antigone. 68-97
Oedipus Rex. 108-49.