Oedipus The King Summary Essay Example

capacitated him with intelligence and wisdom to solve riddle that the Thebes is afflicted with. Self-confidence and pride in his own wisdom is an outstanding feature of his character that also brings his tragedy. Here Oedipus also 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.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.He replies by saying “Sick as you are, not one is sick as I, each of you suffers in himself…but my spirit Groans for the city, for myself, for you”. (62-62)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)”.