Blindness In Sophocles 'Oedipus The King'

In the story Oedipus Rex, we see that the main character Oedipus has a pretty bad temper. He is also quite rude and refuses to listen to what other people have to say, showing us that he is also very selfish. These character flaws lead him to do some things that ended up ruining his life. This leads us to the question, how does Oedipus’ inner blindness lead to his status as a static character and to his downfall?

Oedipus started off not listening to other people and denying everything they had to say because he was selfish. When Tiresias first told Oedipus that he was in fact the murderer of King Laius, Oedipus got very angry and threw him out. He immediately suspected that Tiresias and Creon were teaming up to take Oedipus’ place on the throne and give it to Creon. He never actually listened to what Tiresias was trying to tell him, he just threw him out. He did this to more people throughout the story,

Oedipus was given so many clues in the story as to what was going on but he was still unable to put two and two together. He was also filled with a lot of rage. His rage led him to kill King Laos in the first place and to get into arguments with a few different people, including Creon. Oedipus was always seeking recognition for things that he had done, and never taking the fall for any bad things he did. He punished himself in a way that people would pity, hoping that maybe somebody would feel bad for him. He was greedy, selfish, prideful and rageful and all of these traits eventually lead to his downfall. When he confronted Creon he never thought about how maybe Tiresias was right, and how maybe the gods weren’t lying after all. He just automatically assumed that somebody was out to get him because he couldn’t have done anything wrong. Maybe if he wouldn’t have blamed everyone else for his mistakes he wouldn’t have ended up where he