Analysing oedipus Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Analysing oedipus - Essay Example Father, who inflicted ever-lasting injury on the infant and sent him to his death, strangely did not murder him. â€Å"He (Laius) chose exposure rather than outright murder for the same reason the Creon has Antigone entombed alive: so that he would avoid the pollution† (Gould, 1970, p.93). Oedipus when he came to save the people of Thebes from the Sphinx and was victorious, had no idea how the earlier King, Laius looked. Oedipus was a stranger to Thebes and thought that Jocasta’s husband was of his own age or even younger, perhaps due to her youthful appearance and the man he murdered was definitely a much older man. This prompts him to swiftly ask Jocasta the age of the first King. According to the Queen, her first husband ‘had the splendid figure of a nobleman’, not unlike that of Oedipus and this description makes all the difference to Oedipus. The servant, who begged Jocasta to relieve him so that he could go to the village and live there, had already seen Oedipus on the throne and instantaneously recognised the killer of Laius. He was escaping from the new King. But once Oedipus came to know about it, in his characteristically shrewd and bold way, he requests the Queen to call the servant back to the court, so that he could meet him. The complicated relationships in the play are the main theme. Jocasta was Oedipus’ wife, only to be discovered as his mother is the main person of this play, because she was linked with both the father and son and had been wife to both, even though she was unaware of the situation. â€Å"The poet who created him has penetrated so deeply into the permanent elements of the human situation that his creation transcends time,† (Knox, 1957, p.1). In the famous ‘Tragedy of Fate’, Sophocles shows the helplessness of the man pitted against fate. It is a conflict between the all-powerful will of Gods against the vain attempt of humans to fight against that will. â€Å"It may be that we were all destined to direct our