Oedipus Rex Essay

Oedipus Rex Essay

In the play Oedipus Rex, there many things that the author, Sophocles, used to make it such an interesting and great play. Three of the things I am going to discuss about the play are what made Oedipus a tragic hero, how it is paradoxical that Tiresias is a blind seer, and two incidences of dramatic irony. The first thing that is going to be covered is how Oedipus Rex was a tragic hero. We can conclude this because on multiple occasions he made the audience feel pity and fear. An example of this would be when Oedipus walk in his room to find Iocaste, his wife, had committed suicide by hanging herself, he then gouges out his own eyes saying “No more/ No more shall you look on the misery about me,/ The horrors of my wrongdoing! Too long have you known/ The faces of those whom I was searching!/ For in this hour, go into darkness!”(DiYanni, 1340) Another example is how all throughout the play, the audience knows that Oedipus is the son of Laios and Iocaste, which makes the audience feel such guilt for him because they know all the wrong doings he is about to do but Oedipus himself does not. Tiresias, in the play, is the blind seer. This is paradoxical because even though he is blind, he seems to be able to see better than Oedipus, who is blind to all the facts that Tiresias tells him. When Oedipus goes to Tiresias for questions about the murderer of King Laios, even though he doesn’t want to upset Oedipus, he is forced to tell him the culprit. Even though Oedipus was told he was the culprit, he refuses to accept the fact, being blind to the truth, while Tiresias, athough blind, is able to see the truth in the situation. This is why Tiresias’s character is paradoxical, because even though he is blind, he is able to see clearer than even Oedipus, who seems to be blind to the truth that Tiresias tells him. Two incidences of dramatic irony that I found in the play were when Tiresias tells Oedipus that he is the cause of the plague and that he is the son of Laios and Iocaste yet Oedipus refuses to except that truth and continues believing that he is right when he is horribly wrong. Another example of dramatic irony is when Oedipus dismisses Iocaste’s plea that he terminates the inquiry about the truth of Oedipus’s ancestry. We as an audience know that he will not want to find out because if he does, everything he knows and loves will be no more, yet through his stubbornness and hubris, he pursues it anyways, fulfilling what we, as the audience, predicted. In conclusion, in the play, we discover that through dramatic irony, Oedipus’s character turns out to be a dramatic hero who’s own thought-to-be good intentions ended up being his downfall, and that even though Tiresias was a blind seer, he saw much more than Oedipus did or ever wanted to see.

Works Cited
DiYanni, Robert. Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, 6th Edition. New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies, 2007. Print.

Cited: DiYanni, Robert. Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, 6th Edition. New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies, 2007. Print.