Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

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Characters:
Oedipus, King of Thebes
Laios: Oedipus' father; former king of Thebes
Jokasta: Oedipus' mother/wife
Tireseas: Prophet of Apollo
Kreon: Jocasta's brother
Chorus
Herdsmen
Antigone and Ismene: Oedipus' daughters

Themes/Dichotomies
Blindness (literal and figurative) vs. Seeing
Hubris vs. Humility
Fate vs. Human Action
Gods vs. Mortals
Reason/Passion
Luck
Xenophobia

Other Terms:
Strophe
Antistrophe
Peripeteia: reversal of fortune
Anagnorisis: A recognition
Hamartia: A fatal flaw

Irony: Words used to convey a meaning that is contradictory to its literal meaning.
Allegory: Representation of religious or literary content in a different form or context.
Dramatic Irony: When the protagonist does not know his fate, but the audience does.

Backstory: Once upon a time in Thebes, King Laios and Queen Jokasta had an infant son. They heard not long after of a Delphic Oracle, which predicted that the child would grow up to marry his mother after killing his father. Concerned about the likelihood this would come true, King Laios took the child out in the wilderness to die of exposure. To ensure that the infant didn't crawl away, Laios pinioned the child's feet together. Unfortunately the legend mirrors reality here: in the Ancient world, unwanted children were abandoned to the elements.

Fortunately for Oedipus, a gentle shepherd found the boy and took him in. Later, King Polybos and his queen, Merope of Korinth adopted the boy and raised him as their own son. One day when Oedipus was grown, he heard the Oracle that he would one day murder his father and marry his mother. He ran away to Thebes. Then, "at a place where three paths crossed," Oedipus encountered a man in a chariot and the two had a confrontation. Oedipus killed the man, not knowing he was in fact Laios, his father.

Oedipus then returned to Thebes, where he encountered the Sphinx: a creature that was part human female, part lion, eagle, and snake. The Sphinx would not allow anyone into Thebes unless he could answer her riddle: What creature walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and on three legs in the evening? Oedipus was the only one to answer correctly: "Man." After having defeated the Sphinx, Oedipus was honored as a hero. He then married Laios' widow, Jocasta.

As the play opens, Oedipus has ruled Thebes for many years. He and his wife have had four children. However, a plague has swept the city, and it has destroyed crops, livestock, and human lives. The citizens turn to Oedipus to do something to stop the plague.

In reading Oedipus Rex, one encounters a personality of the king that is prideful and often arrogant; he flaunts his deeds and courage; he ignores the advice of sages and goes stubbornly forward to meet his fate. As Athenian audiences watched Oedipus seal his own fate, they may have been much amused at this dramatic irony: the protagonist's unwitting testimony to his own fate. As he presses the blind prophet Teiresius to tell him the truth of Laios's killer, Oedipus unknowingly condemns himself.

The king's relentless pride is what the Greeks called hubris: a pride that precedes a downfall. Our text observes that many critics see Oedipus Rex as a "tragedy of fate" in which a powerful man is brought down by "destiny or the gods." In truth Athenian audiences were often drawn to themes in which the mighty experience a fall. Nevertheless, Sophocles' appropriates the myth which "can be seen as a story about the inevitable unfolding of divine will" and takes it toward a new dimension of an inherited curse: one in which the focus of our attention shifts from mere retelling to the king's experience in finding out what he has done--and the legacy he leaves in his wake.

Readers may be faced with a taxing question of whether Oedipus can be blamed entirely for the fate that befalls him, or to what extent the protagonist invited these tragedies upon himself. Important to note when deciding questions of the king's responsibility is the distinction Greek philosophy observes between "moral culpability" and "religious pollution": that is, the differences between evil that is carried out knowingly and deliberately, and an insidious evil that "afflict[s] even those who are morally innocent" (704). Readers must decide for themselves whether Oedipus is a tragic figure, a pitiable character, or a morally bankrupt character. How we read Oedipus himself goes a long way to determine what themes convey the most meaning for us.