Oedipus Rex (Oedipus the King) (edition 2005)

Oedipus of Sophocles is a great work of art written by a great poet,this play symbolizes for the human misery and despair...
the torments of the human soul,the innocence and guilt,Wisdom Out of Suffering and Fate that determines many things no matter how we struggle to change it....
Oedipus hears about his dreadful fate from the Delphic oracle and flees from Corinth. But instead of fleeing from his fate he runs into it...

Oedipus a passionate heart,who ask questions and take risks,has all the qualities of a great man...he has gone through sudden shifts on the course of his life and lets every situation control him....

Despite his flaws, Oedipus is a good person who seeks the truth no matter how devastating. and who accept the responsibility for his actions.....

At the end of the play, Oedipus accepts his fate as well as the punishment given to him ....

He had promised to exile the one who is responsible for the plague , and he fulfills his promise even if he himself is the one to be exiled. By mercilessly punishing himself, he becomes a great hero...
who has a Respect for Justice ....

Jocasta, on the other hand, appears as a person who would rather control the situation. She reveals that she is more mature than Oedipus and even reveals a maternal side towards him. This is evident in the way she tries to stop Oedipus from investigating further into the mystery of his birth. At this point, she has realized the possibility that Oedipus may be her son. She would rather let the dreadful fact remain a mystery then let it ruin their lives
The entwined sheets with which she hangs herself symbolize the double life she has led........

Oedipus tragic position and his trial to elude the prophecies and to challenge his Fate, that was inevitable as he at last fails, but just having the courage to attempt , makes him a true hero.

This play raises a question,when someone is trying to avoid doing things. Does he have free will or the ability to choose his own path or is everything in life predetermined?







( )

This was one of the hardest reads. I didn't enjoy the writing at all in this particular writing, but I was forced to read it for my theater course. It was an okay read, but I would not want to subject someone else to this book. It is very sad and horrible, in my opinion. ( )

Me encantó. Un hombre que lucha contra su destino, un hombre cuyos sentimientos desbordan lo racional. La Naturaleza hará cumplir las normas hasta a quien las desconozca.



Este libro es el gran representante de la tragedia griega, con todo su drama, sus emociones, su dinamismo y fatídico final. ( )

In these end times, it's rare to come to any great work fresh, but it's hard to imagine much that's as predetermined as Oedipus--forget Freud, forget Turin Turambar, forget that the Sphinx has been missing her nose so long none of us even remembers what she looked like when she asked Oedi that riddle that we've all known the answer to as long as we knew that riddles had answers. Even the basics of this story are, pardon the expression, mother's milk--if you know one thing about The Brothers Karamazov it's Jesus and the Inquisitor, or maybe that a SON MURDERS his mean old dad; and if you know one thing about Hamlet it's to be or not to be or maybe that there's something a bit OEDIPAL between the prince and his ma; but if you know one thing about Oedipus, it's the same thing everyone else in the world knows: he killed his father and married his mother, and even 2400 years later he's not lived it down.

And granted, there are surprises actually coming to the play--Sophocles observes the thee unities (in fact he was Aristotle's major model for what constitutes quality drama, including those stupid unities), and so this isn't done in the way a modern would do it, as a twisted Bildungsroman, a coming to filthy self-knowledge. We don't see the expected sweep of a tragic life: no Sphinx, no killing at the crossroads, except in flashback; we don't see Oedipus living as a broken man, and feel the catharsis of watching time restore him some human dignity (I understand some of that comes in the sequels). Instead we get the story of a single (really bad) day, in classic(al) Thespian style. And for me at least it does suffer the littlest bit for it. Things don't happen for a reason, but simply because they're fated; we create our own prison; yeah yeah. But at least that long term gives us a chance to make our own meaning. Sophocles is a master and the text is rich, rich, but anything we can say about the "meaning" here, the what is a just king (Oedi and Cleon and their respective flaws) or the compulsion to self-knowledge (Oedipus as proto-Faust) or the sick generation game of blood-will-out and how we repeat our parents' mistakes (I note that the original reason for Laius's being cursed, according to Euripedes, was that he buggered a young boy--history's original pederast, in the Greek imagination, as before that boy-love was reserved for the gods because it was soooo hot--and think it doesn't take much imagination to see this as a kind of story about child abuse, somewhat displaced of course, and its scars)....

...you can do all that but the fact remains that all that happens in this play is--Sophocles doesn't even show you, he tells you--Oedipus kills his dad and marries his mom, and puts out his eyes, and that's it, that's the play. It's all anyone knows about Oedipus, and they're still talking about it. It's like high school.

And so there's a slight unfinishedness about this, despite yer precious unities. Luckily, as a dramatization of what amounts to just a cringeworthy episode, it's magnificent. Sophocles knew his craft. Every step--the bravado, the intrigue, the slowly unfolding horror--is riveting, and elevated in that Greek way that makes you really believe in the significance of it all, and the characters are so deft and economically conveyed. Oedipus most of all, and the fact that everyone knows except him (even the original audience did, because the story was an old one) is what makes it work. He's not some crawling goatbotherer, not an angel--what he is is a worldbeater, a hero and bully, bursting with self-love and assurance of his place in the pantheon, a too-good-for-his-own-goodnik whose monster victory (putting him on a place with Theseus, Bellerophon, etc.) came from not only an immense piece of cleverness but also from a riddle about the measure of the lineaments and life of a man: four legs in the morning, two in the noon, three in the evening like Oedipus's poor auld dead dad, right?

It's the biggest, most artfully induced cringe of all when you think about it that way (depending how you handle the part where he puts brooches through his eyes). Oedipus is the tall brilliant son of Polybus and Merope, the prince of Corinth, and no doubt on some level the awful prophecy that causes him to flee home is also a source of self-fascination--some hint of mystery, of divine machinations, and if the prognosis of fatherslaying and motherfucking is a bit usettling, well, let him go deal with that by making his name elsewhere, taking Thebes, all too easy, as is his birthright (ouch) and the rest of the spoils, up to and including the recently bereaved queen. No propriety will stay in his way, and how that must multiply his chagrin when the truth comes--he is the riddlemaster, the mocker of Tireisas, THE HERO, and killing your dad and marrying your mum is the kind of thing that happens to poor people.

One more metaphor there--if you're born to success, or even a self-made man, don't look to closely at how you got it. And that's the final measure of Sophocles's artistry (at least in this book--I'm looking forward to that how-do-you-put-your-life-back-together stuff in ): that he manages to make this high-fiving swell sympathetic. Sophocles leaves Oedipus at the darkest moment: when "Who am I?" becomes "What am I?" And who (knowing all along who, what ego, what id) mutilated my life?" The last thing we see him do is put out his eyes not because he can't face suicide, exactly, but because he can't face the idea of seeing Laius and Jocasta in Hades, nor face the world as the thing he now is. And then, gather his daughters to him. Suffering makes us complex, and I'm curious to see what's next for the Prince of Thebes, but until then this little number hits like a thunderbolt. ( )

Sophocles's fatalism is somewhat foreign to the modern reader, and while Oedipus's determination to discover the truth is admirable, it's unfortunate that this turns out to be his fatal flaw. But this is still a powerfully dramatic play even today. ( )