Wanting and Vaunting

Circa 2001

Wanting and Vaunting
     by Dime-a-Dozen Doug

The subjects of Oedipus Rex are pride and love. Pride is the conventional subject of Greek tragedy. This that follows shows how pride as a quality of Oedipus’ character plays itself out in drama. Sophocles characterizes Oedipus (that is makes him a believable character) by motivating him. His motivation is his angry pride, his feeling that he should not have been targeted by the gods in the first place and burdened with such a terrible prediction, such a curse, told by the oracle that he will kill his father and marry his mother!
This excessive pride, which motivates all of Oedipus’s his actions as far as a reading of the play as Greek tragedy goes, is played out in the following actions as the episodia portray them:
– Oedipus announces, too proudly for the fates, that he suffers as much as or more than the citizens of Thebes;
-Oedipus falsely condemns both Creon and Tiresias, calling them traitors who have plotted to destroy Oedipus so Creon can steal the kingship from him;
– Oedipus sends for the Oracle a second time to find out what is causing Thebes to suffer. This may seem understandable, but it shows us that Oedipus is not content to let god-decreed events take place or take their own course. He pushes the fates at every turn and in every way to hurry up the future, to bring destiny to pass by force;
– Oedipus overdramatizes all of his feelings in order to push the fates to end the whole affair: the attack of the men on the road; his absurd attempt to answer the sphinx’s riddle; his vaunting at Creon and Teresias to goad them into telling him more; his intense lamenting before Jocasta to see whether she can provide him with more information than she already has done (ashamed by what she knows she wishes, of course, to keep silent about all); his unnecessary threats to kill the old shepherd who wishes to keep quiet about what he knows.