Horror and Self-punishment in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex

Horror and Self-punishment in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex

An ancient plate portraying Oedipus listening to the riddle of the Sphinx. Oedipus Rex is a play whose qualities of inscrutability and of pervasive irony quickly come to complicate any critical discussion. It is a play of transformations in which things change before our eyes as we watch; where meanings and implications seem to be half-glimpsed beneath the surface of the text only to vanish as we try to take them in; and where ironical resemblance and reflections abound to confuse our response. The play encourages us to make connections and to draw out implications that in the end we are forced to reassess, to question and perhaps abandon.

The play's meaning through two oppositions is defined by its stage action and its language, are parallel and complimentary to each other. The play is, in a way that determines our response to its meaning, a sequential experience. Our response is shaped through the duration of its performance.

The opening of the play presents us with a gathering, the old and the young, no women, no fully adult males, so that Oedipus is, at once, magnified and isolated. His calm authority is overwhelming and majestic. But on what does Oedipus' authority rest? There is a crucial uncertainty here. The opening scenes present us with an image of Oedipus as a political figure, a human king whose power derives from the community he rules, whose perceptions and whose feelings are indissoluble bound up with the experience of the men of Thebes, whose language he speaks and where he belongs.

We are swept aside as a gathering panic occupies Oedipus' mind at hearing mention of a place he remembers, where he once killed a man. If that man was Laius, Oedipus s...

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...e vain attempts of mankind to escape the evil that threatens them. There is an unmistakable indication in the text of Sophocles' tragedy itself that the legend of Oedipus sprang from some primeval dream-material that had as its content the distressing disturbance of a child's relation to his parents owing to the first stirring of sexuality. At a point when Oedipus, though he is not yet enlightened, has begun to feel troubled by his recollections of the oracle, Jocasta consoles him by referring to a dream, as she thinks, it has no meaning. It is clearly the key to the tragedy and the complement to the dream of the dreamer's father being dead. The story of Oedipus is the reaction of the imagination to these typical dreams. And just as the dreams, when dreamt by adults, are accompanied by feelings of repulsion, so too the legend must include horror and self-punishment.