Dramatic Characterization in Oedipus Rex

   

Dramatic Characterization in Oedipus Rex

       by Douglas Grimier

Well, class, this likely will be the last time I see you before the pleasures that stretch before you of leaving study and the anxiety of grades behind for a week and a half or so. During this time I expect that you will all take good care of yourselves so that when you return here there are no stories of tragedy to unfold to me because .... well, I care for every one of you as if you were my own offspring. Now, on to the subject at hand. Are we not so very lucky, to be blessed with minds that can read in new ways the stories of the old, old, old literature.

      And it is Sophocles’ most famous play that will entertain us today. The subjects of Oedipus Rex are love and pride. Pride is the conventional subject of Greek tragedy. This discussion that follows shows how pride, as a quality of Oedipus’s character, develops in his telling of the story. Sophocles characterizes Oedipus (that is, makes him a believable character) by motivating him. Oedipus’s motivation is his angry pride, his feeling that he should not have been targeted by the gods in the first place, not have been loaded with such a horrible burden as the Oracle places on him. This excessive pride, which motivates all of Oedipus’s behaviour, becomes increasingly clear to us, to his audience, in the course of the episodia(a term specific to Greek tragedy, loosely meaning “events”). Among the episodiaare these: 

-oedipus madly fights a whole group of soldiers he meets along the road to Thebes, angered by rough treatment from the king, who is disguised as a citizen.

-Oedipus announces, too proudly for the fates, that he suffers as much as or more than the citizens of the city of Thebes, who have undergone such terrible suffering at the hands of the voracious Sphinx.

-Oedipus impetuously and falsely condemns both Creon and Tiresias, calling them traitors who have plotted to destroy Oedipus so Creon can take over the kingship.

-Oedipus sends for the Oracle a second time to find out what is causing Thebes such suffering. This may seem understandable, but it shows us that Oedipus is not content to let events take their own course. He goads the fates all along in every way to hurry up and bring (his) destiny to pass.

-Oedipus publicly overdramatizes all of his feelings in order to push the fates to end the whole affair: his single-handed attack and killing of the large group of soldiers on the road to Thebes, his preposterous decision to answer the Sphinx’s riddle; his vaulting at the innocent Creon and Teresias to drive them into telling him more; his intense lamenting before Jocasta to see whether she can provide him with more information than she already has (she wishes, of course, to keep silent about it all); his unnecessary threats to kill the Old Shepherd who wishes to keep quiet about what he knows; and his final rapturous responses to Creon when that kind man lets him see his children once more.

-Oedipus’s excessive actions (driving into his eyes a hairpin from his mother/wife’s hair, which blinds and maims him but does not kill him) when he recognizes the truth of his marriage to his own mother.

     In summary, Oedipus eventually knows (though he has already long suspected, I believe) that he is doomed to kill his father and marry his mother, but with great hubris he pits his wits and emotions against the gods. He rages against them for their unfairness. This raging against the gods and against his own fate is his tragic flaw. “He should have taken his medicine like a Man,” the old saying goes. But, more even than the children he hugs in all his gore at the end, he appears to be an adolescent (a show off) in all his actions. He is petulant and angry that he is bound to do what he does not wish to do. His petulance, his childish anger, that is, his noble, regal pride are his downfall. These actions may actually not be noble but ignoble. Unless there is another explanation. And there is! He is, in fact, and has been for the entire time since he has learned of his future from the old, unwelcome party guest back in his home city, in unbearable pain with his knowledge. Against all odds he has not been able to find release in death, since he has twice tested his ability to die (fighting the soldiers single-handedly; facing the Sphinx’s impossible challenge). He wishes for his pain to end now, not later, and so he pokes and pinches at the fates in order to hurry them up.

     There is, however, another subject besides pride in this play, and that is love. Oedipus has been deprived of the love of his parents from an early age. This deprivation of affection, of attention from loving parents, of the normal love of a wife, and of the love of a real good father, are the real motivation for his astonishing anger, sadness, vaunting, overreacting, busy pushing for answers and so on. He does not wish to live if the gods do not love him. He does not wish to live if he has parents who are not really his. He does not wish to live if he has married his mother who consequently cannot love him for obvious reasons. He does not wish to live if he cannot ever receive the true love and affection of the children he has spawned because they will not be able to love a father who is really their brother! They will never themselves ever be able to be married because of the stigma of their father!

     Oedipus, sensing long ago that he cannot ever find love or be loved, rages all along against the gods for their unfairness and he longs now finally not for death but for revenge on the heavens. He wants, he wishes, the world to see for a long time to come when they hear the story of his loath able blindness  how unfair the gods are who rob us arbitrarily of love.

     Students, this is a novel analysis of the play and of Sophocles’ purposes unimagined by any previous intellectual. I am specifically and particularly capably fit to bring for you a reading of the play’s purposes that is incredibly exciting. It is exciting, class, because it has never before been read this way.  before, and it is an exceptionally insightful reading. Keep that in mind when you remember over the next many decades this moment, this class with its astonishing insights and lessons to learn about how to read old texts and how to live in this awkward world. I wish you a very good holiday and expect to see you back here again after the midterm break during which I assume many of you will be heading to Florida to celebrate the week and a half that you have of liberty before the return to the harness and stepping into the work load again.