Summary Of 'Oedipus'

1. After much prompting, Teiresias tells Oedipus that Oedipus is the man at the core of the plague from which Thebes is suffering; the man who wed his own mother and whose hands are covered with the blood of his father. I don 't think it 's a sign of stupidity on the part of Oedipus to take so long to recognize his guilt. If anything, he was in denial of it. The play describes him as a smart man who was able to solve the riddles of Sphinx, so he may have realized his guilt -- the story that Jocasta told him was awfully similar to the prophecy that Teiresias revealed to him. Oedipus gathering the men from Corinth was a desperate attempt at "say it ain 't so!" in the hopes that the prophecy was wrong and didn 't apply to him. It also added the

Jocasta is not a flat character. She shows strong emotion and cares deeply for Oedipus, insisting he brush off the prophecy as untrue and spare himself the headache. Likewise, she is also trusting of her brother, begging Oedipus to spare Creon “for [her] sake and the sake of those who stand here” (line 714). She commits suicide after it is confirmed that the prophecy was fulfilled, and her marital bed has been tainted; a flat character would have held her head in her hands and cried out, but Jocasta took fate into her own hands, for a change, considering the fate of her first husband and child had already been predetermined.

6. Dramatic irony is when an audience recognizes the meaning of a situation and forsees its conclusion, while the characters of the story or play do not. Instances of dramatic irony in this play are shown each time Oedipus finds out more about his past and his adoptive parents. In the following example, the audience knows that Oedipus killed his father, though he does not know it until the messenger throws a little knowledge his way:

Messenger: Do you know that all your fears are

Freud’s explanation does not explain my feelings toward the play. Firstly, I have trouble supporting his theory that Oedipus and Electra complexes affect every single person in their childhood. Where does that put those of us who are daughters of single mothers, or sons of single fathers? Secondly, Oedipus was sent away as a days-old newborn. I’m sure Freud would argue that Oedipus still had a deeply subconscious memory of his birth mother and has since desired her sexually well into adulthood, but I truly consider that to be reaching. Oedipus’s fate was to murder his father and bed his mother, something that I do not believe is the unconscious desire of each of us and the reason people like to see and read this