Essay about Oedipus the King

Oedipus Rex has an extremely unusual plot but it has a recognizable beginning.

Oedipus the King relates the story of Oedipus who reached Thebes, having killed on the way an old man with whom he picked a quarrel. The city of Thebes was then suffering terribly because of the monster, the Sphinx. He solved her riddle and citizens of Thebes offered him the kingdom as city is afflicted with the loss of their king, who had been murdered while on a pilgrimage. So he assumed the power and married the widowed queen. Here the tragedy of Oedipus takes its final course.

As a character, Oedipus is larger than life character.There are certain qualities that distinguish him as a man. The most striking of these, of course, is his intelligence and the great faith that he and others put in it. By solving the riddles of sphinx, he has provided a verified and verifiable evidence of his wisdom. He is a highly successful king who is devoted to his subjects, regarding them as his children and they also esteem and love him. We see in the prologue of the play that Oedipus is very careful about the interest and welfare of his subjects and take all the appropriate measures he can to eradicate their troubles.

Oedipus seems to be obsessed with his own intelligence and this leads him to very unfortunate and uncomfortable situations. This tragic flaw of Oedipus laps over with his pride as he is extremely proud of the fact that he was able to solve the riddle of the Sphinx which had proved too much for any other person. He thinks that Gods has capacitated him with intelligence and wisdom to solve riddle that the Thebes is afflicted with. Oedipus even taunts Tireseas on his inability in solving the Sphinx’s riddle.

He says; And where were you, when the Dog-faced Witch was here? Have you any word of deliverance then for our people? There was a riddle too deep for common wits; A seer should have answered it, but answer there came none From you….. (12-16) After calling the soothsayer false prophet, Oedipus boasts of his own skill in having solved the puzzled which proved too much for the blind seer; Until I came—I, ignorant Oedipus, came— And stopped the riddler’s mouth, guessing he truth By mother-wit, not bird-lore. (17-19)So he describes Tireseas predictive cautions as the whims of a fanatic and opposes the seer’s prophecy with arguments of his own.

Self-confidence and pride in his own wisdom is an outstanding feature of his character that also brings his tragedy. Here Oedipus fulfills the traits of Aristotelian tragic hero as he possesses a noble tragic flaw. The man who sets out on his new task by sending first for the venerable seer is not lacking in pious reverence; but we also observe that Oedipus manifests unrestrained arrogance in his own intellectual achievement.No seer found the solution, this is Oedipus boast; no bird, no god revealed it to him, he “the utterly ignorant” had to come on his own and hit the mark by his own wit. This is a justified pride but it amounts too much.

This pride and self-confidence induce Oedipus to despise prophecy and feel almost superior to the gods. He tell the people who pray for deliverance from pathos and miseries they are afflicted with if they listen to and follow his advice in order to get a remedy. It can be said that the tragedy of Oedipus is the result more of his good qualities than his bad ones.It is his love for Thebes which makes him send Creon to Delphi to consult the Oracles.

It is the same care for his subjects which makes him proclaim a ban and a curse on the murderer of Laius. It is his absolute honesty which makes him include even himself within the curse and the punishment. He is angry with Tireseas because he is unable to tolerate the fact that although the prophet says that he know who the murderer of Laius is , he refuses top give the information to the king.His rage and rashness is due to the fact that the masses are suffering and Tireseas does not provide the murderer’s name. Oedipus cannot but regard this as a clear manifestation of the seer’s disloyalty to his city.

To Oedipus the discovery of truth is more important than his own good and safety. Even when it seems that the investigation that he is carrying on will not produce any result which will be him, he decides to carry on with it. He is so honest with himself that he inflicts the punishment of self-blinding and banishment from the city of Thebes.So his moral goodness also seems as a tragic flaw that brings his ruin. Bernard Knox eulogizes Oedipus’ “dedication to truth, whatever the cost” (p. 117) Sophocles is a master of irony; Oedipus Rex is rich in irony at all levels.

There is basic irony in the fact that Oedipus whose own birth and parentage are a riddle to him, becomes famed as a solver of riddles and takes pride in this fact. The efforts of Oedipus to escape his destiny, as foretold by oracle, are also ironical because they land him in the exact place which he ought to have avoided most of all.Many of the speeches of Oedipus are highly ironical e. g. he says that avenging the death of Laius, he would be acting on his behalf as well as on that of Thebans, not knowing how true this words are, for he would be avenging the death of his own father—and he would have to avenge it on himself since he is the real murderer. There is another manifestation of this irony i.

e. intellectual myopia of Oedipus. Oedipus possesses faultless physical vision throughout play except in the end but he remains blind to the reality regarding himself.At one point in the play, he has the ability to see but he is not willing to do so. He intellectual vision comes with his physical loss of sight but he is unable to cast away the psychological “slings and arrows” and mental sufferings that intellectual blindness has afflicted on him.

So his blindness, both intellectual at the start of the play and physical at the end of the day, is the worst.Theme of blindness interweaves with the main plot from the very start of the play when Oedipus says, “I would be blind to misery not to pity my people kneeling at my feet. 14)” It manifest that he refers to blindness that if he will not recognize the distress of his people. This shows his physical sight but intellectual blindness as he himself was the cause of those afflictions. Later he acknowledges that although Tiresias is physically blind but has prophetic power when he says, “Blind as you are, you can feel all the more what sickness haunts our city.

(344)”. Oedipus can be held guilty due to another tragic flaw—his inability to take appropriate preventive measures.It is said that he fails to take logical steps and precaution s which would have saved him from committing the crimes. “Could not Oedipus…have escaped his doom if he had been more careful? Knowing that he was in danger of committing parricide and incest, would not really a prudent man have avoided quarrelling, even in self-defense and also love-relations with women older than himself?.

.. real life I suppose he might. But we not entitled to blame Oedipus either for carelessness failing to compile a hand list or lack of self-control in failing to obey its injunctions. (Dodds, p.

40)All the above-mentioned manifestation of tragic flaw, their supported arguments and views of the critics clearly proves the thesis that Oedipus unavoidable ignorance was the major factor of his tragedy because he was unable to locate that the man whom he assaulted on the crossroads to Thebes was his father. Secondly, if he would not have been occupied by his aspirations, he would have possibly explored the horror of his deed and could have avoided the additional tricky situations by not marrying his mother.Thirdly, his “conscious and intentional” act includes his decision to “bring what is dark to light” (133). Furthermore, as result to revelation of Tireseas, he charges Creon with conspiracy and murder and denounces Tireases as an accessory. Although these actions were intentional and bring Oedipus to tragic end but have a clear background that illustrate that these actions were not “deliberate”.

Fourthly, all these errors originate from a hasty and obstinate temperament, unjustified anger and excessive pride that compels him to an energized inquisitiveness.With the development of the plot, all these ascriptions of his character jumps back with amplified force on his head that finally culminates at his tragedy. Knox (1957) sums up in this way; “the actions of Oedipus that produce the catastrophe stem from all sides of his character; no one particular action is more essential than any other; they are all essential and they involve not any one trait of character which might be designated a hamartia but the character of Oedipus as a whole” (31).