Who Is Creon A Tragic Hero In Antigone

Creon and Antigone both have a pretty tragic part in the play, “Antigone”, but who’s the more tragic character? I have an answer for you. With a little bit of evaluation, you’ll find that Antigone is indeed the more tragically doomed of the two, and here’s why. So just to start out, Antigone was indeed of noble birth as most tragic heroes are, but there’s something about her family tree that makes her a little bit different from the rest. Her father, Oedipus, also happens to be her brother. The story is that the King and Queen of Thebes had a son that was supposed to grow older, kill his Dad, and, uhm, “lay” with his Mom. Okay, a little creepy right? So the King and Queen gave their son to a sheppard and said, “go kill this kid, he’s weird.” The problem though, is that he didn’t. What he did do was take poor little Oedie to the next village and let him live. Long story short, Oedipus comes back, kills his Dad, and
has a few children with his Mom...four to be exact. Their names were Eteocles, Polynices, Ismene, and Antigone. Once Oedipus and his Mother found out what their relationship ACTUALLY was, his Mom threw herself off of the roof, and Oedipus clawed his eyes out. Lovely, right? Well it gets worse, so keep reading. So not only is Antigone an incest child, with no Mother, she’s also living with her uncle because Oedipus is off somewhere being blind. Her uncle, Creon, happens to be crazy, and I’ll prove why. Thebes was at war with a neighboring town/country thing and both of her brothers are fighting this war...except, they’re both fighting from different ends. Eteocles is with Thebes, and Polynices is with the opposing side. Antigone’s brothers somehow manage to kill each other in battle, so now the only family she has is her sister, Creon, his wife, and his son, Haemon, who also happens to be her finace. To make matters even worse, Creon says to bury Eteocles...but leave Polynices out in the open for the wild dogs to eat and rip apart. I KNOW, RIGHT? Antigone heard of this and she was like, “nuh uh, I’ll be having none of that, thank you,” and went off to get Ismene to bury Polynices with her. Ismene is a total wimp, so of course she said no, but this didn’t stop our girl Antigone. Do you see where this is going? It just goes downhill from here. After Ismene says no, Antigone sets off to bury him by herself, no help needed.
Some guards notice that he’s been buried and go to tell Creon, who, by the way, freaks the heck out. The guards clear the dirt off of him and continue watching over the body. Antigone comes back the next day and sees him unburied and bursts into tears. Of course, then she buries him again, but this time she gets caught. So the same guard that oh, so narrowly escaped death the first time he went to visit Creon comes back, and this time he has Antigone with him. She happily admits to the “crime” and Creon is just like, “this girl is a crazy anarchist, throw her in a cave with food! The gods can save her if they want!” SO that’s just what they do, and everyone starts flipping out. They know that Antigone was right to bury her brother even though the law forbade it. So Haemon decides that he’s gonna go talk to his insane father and try to tell him that this is a bad idea, but because he’s a paranoid, power crazy lunatic, Creon is just not hearing anything that his poor son
says. How could this get any worse? They throw Antigone into the cave and seal it off. Oh, and Haemon goes to save Antigone, only to find that she’s already hung herself to avoid a slow death by dehydration. Creon comes running after Haemon and sees him crying, holding Antigone’s corpse, and then witnesses his son stab himself in the gut. Well, he goes home and his wife finds out about Haemon and she blames him for the death of her son, and then promptly kills herself too. There’s so much death going on and Creon is just like, “whhhhyyyyyyyy?” It’s so lovely.
This is where the whole, “my fate was tragic because it wasn’t my fault” thing comes in, because guess what. It wasn’t her fault. How was she to know that eventually Haemon, and then the idiotic Creon would come to her rescue? She felt like she had filled her purpose, and that there was no use in rotting away in a cave, doomed to die anyway. Now, here’s why Creon is the less tragic of the two. Everything that Creon had happen to him in the end of the story, was completely his fault. I mean come on, he’s the one that wouldn’t let Antigone bury her brother like he should have been in the first place, AND threw her in a cave to die despite the desperate pleas of his son and many others. He’s the dynamic dummy, not Antigone. She was just doing what was morally, and I guess religiously right. She wasn’t hurting anything except for Creon’s insubstantial male ego. It’s not really her fault that she was thrown into cave jail. Well, it IS, but it isn’t...because Creon’s a jerk. My point is that it shouldn’t have happened. Antigone should have been able to bury Polynices just like Eteocles, therefore making her the most tragic of the two, and the hero of the story. ( which by proxy makes her a tragic hero )