Comparison Of Antigone In Oedipus The King By Sophocles

Sophocles, an ancient Greek tragic poet, has apparently written about 120 plays, but not all of them are acknowledged or have survived. Antigone is the part three of the Oedipus series, but Sophocles wrote this play first and then the other ones; he went backward with the series chronologically. Antigone (441 B.C.), Oedipus the King (around 430 B.C.), and Oedipus at Colonus (somewhere between 406-405 B.C.) are the most famous plays out of those 120 plays. Sophocles has a tragic hero in all of his tragedy plays. A tragic hero is a character that makes a judgmental error that eventually leads to his or her own destruction. In Antigone, even though he lives, Creon is the tragic hero because he has to pay for his deeds.

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Antigone cannot be a tragic hero because there is nothing that she can learn because she has not made false decisions that she will regret. She is just doing what Creon should have done; she is obeying the God’s law. One more reason why Creon is the tragic hero of Antigone is that he has made a mistake by refusing to bury Polynices’ body and by burying Antigone alive in a cave in the mountains. Tiresias, a blind prophet of Thebes, tells Creon that he has made an enormous mistake and he should fix it before he has “to repay a corpse of [his] own, one of [his] own children as recompense” (894-895). Creon is an intelligent man; he learned from his errors and tried to fix them but, unfortunately, it was too late. The deaths at the end of Antigone, “however, leave a final impression of catharsis and an emptying of all emotion, with all passions spent” (“Antigone”). Antigone’s death leads to more deaths, which kills Creon’s pride. He had to pay for his unlawful decisions by his wife’s and his son’s death. He even “invite(s) Death” and says “come and take me. I cannot bear to live” (Lines 1076-77). He recognizes that he has to live on his own and has to carry the guilt of killing his family for the rest of his lifetime when chorus chants, “you’ll get what’s destined”