Essays on Oedipus Page 2

Oedipus Rex, one of Sophocles’ seven remaining plays, is a perfect example of a tragedy. Tragedy, defined by Aristotle in his work the Poetics, “is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude”(Aristotle, sec. 1, part VI). What Aristotle meant in saying this is, tragedy is a representation of…

Oedipus Rex (Oedipus The King) is a series of plays by Sophocles that was written in 430 b.c (spark notes) and is known as the classical Greek play. It’s the story of Oedipus, who trying to flee from his fate or prophecy but ends up running right into it. The play starts off with Oedipus…

Dramatic irony is when the audience knows something that the characters don’t. This adds suspense for the audience because they know what is going to happen to the character, but they can’t stop it. Dramatic irony is used in the play Oedipus Rex to give a greater dramatic effect. Specific instances of irony have effects…

The Ancient Greeks valued entertainment as a society and one form of that entertainment was Greek Drama. The Ancient Greeks used Greek drama to exploit the world they lived in by trying to make sense of its meaning and the purpose of themselves in the world. The Greeks used these dramas to evoke a sense…

Oedipus Rex is a Greek tragedy which tells the tale of King Oedipus, a man who sets out to find King Laius’ killer and ends up finding out more about who he is and what he has done. He finds that all along it was he who had killed King Laius, who turns out to…

Throughout the story Oedipus the King imagery is employed frequently in regard to lightness and darkness. When Oedipus sets out to find the killer of Laius, acting heroically to save the kingdom he discovers much more than he ever would have wished for. While interrogating the citizens of Thebes he comes across Tiresias, a blind…

Socrates’s philosophy of wisdom was rooted heavily upon the realization that all humans are ignorant: the defense he used at his own trial was that he himself was the wisest man in Athens simply because he was adequately self-aware enough to recognize his own ignorance, or lack of knowledge. In Sophocles’s play, Oedipus’s hamartia, a…

Through the whims and wills of the Gods, humans play a preconceived part in the story of life, and our every deed simply a line in the play. This idea that the span of a person’s life is nothing but an allotment of misery and suffering doomed upon oneself can be held as a precept…