Plot plays a significant role in the progression of the story. During this time period, play writers would familiarize the audience with certain characters in plays, such as Apollo for example. The audience would always associate certain events that would happen to that character because their story remained the same throughout all of the plays. Sophocles familiarizes the audience with his characters as well, but he does it for a different result. He changes the story of a certain character to grab the audiences' attention, shocking them in a way. In my opinion, this is why Sophocles progressed in play writing so well. He created new plays in a way, thus the audience would pay more attention and they would be more excited for his next play.
For me the ending of the play was very cliche in that it was the typical ending for a tragedy. The main character goes through a whole speech trying to stress the mistakes that he did. However, it was interesting that in his time of great peril, he did not kill himself, but he rather blinded himself. Oedipus claims to have done it because, "I, with my eyes, how could I look my father in the eyes when I go down to death? Or mother, so abused... I have done such thing to the two of them, crimes too huge for hanging. Worse yet, the sight of my children, born as they were born, how could I long to look into their eyes? No, not with these eyes of mine, never" (243). He did it because he could not bear to see his mistakes with his eyes. He does not want to see what he did. Oedipus feels as if blinding himself would be better because then when he died, he would be blind, rather than seeing everything he had done previously.
No comments:
Post a Comment