Journal #3: Oedipus

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.

Journal #1: Literary Topics

I have found it interesting that Sophocles uses the motif of sight and blindness. In fact I noticed a hint of irony when Oedipus talks to Tiresias. Although Tiresias is blind, he clearly "sees" how horrible the society is ran by Oedipus. But the funny thing is, is that although Oedipus has sight, he is "blind" in that he thinks he is doing a good job at being in charge of the society, while in reality, the society is poor and is terrible. I almost get the feeling that being blind is having the ability to see. Also, there is a motif of heat. For example, he uses "blazes" and "fire" throughout the story so far. It seems that every page has a reference to heat in some way. I'm not quite sure why Sophocles does this, but if I were to take a guess, I would say that it has to do something about sight, and being able to reveal something unknown. And by unknown, I mean that Oedipus is unaware of his blindness to society. For example, he writes, "torches blazing" many times, especially on page 170. A burning torch gives me the image of trying to find something that is unknown, or just trying to find something in general.

Another thing that I noticed was how arrogant Oedipus is. This adds to the blindness he possesses because he does not want to admit, and doesn't notice, that the society is poorly ran. This plays a huge role in the plot of the story. Because of his arrogance, he denies everything, thus leading him to his downfall.

This plays along with the large amount of foreshadowing. Sophocles uses foreshadowing to help shape the story, obviously foreshadowing Oedipus's downfall. He mentions death, and always capitalizes it. I believed that this is foreshadowing someone's death. Not necessarily Oedipus's death, but one who plays a significant role in the story.