Oedipus Rex Sight Motif Essay

In Oedipus Rex, through the use of a sight motif, Sophocles shows the world to be a place where there is a dystopian society. The world of Oedipus Rex is a dystopian society, since it highlights a blind man who sees everything, a well-sighted king who is blind to everything, a queen who messes up the family tree, and a penniless man who rises to the throne.

Creon’s rise to the throne and Teiresias’ expert skills in being a clairvoyant intertwined the sight motif into this quote by Teiresias, “A blind man, who has his eyes now; a penniless man, who is rich now.” Teiresias played a key role in this play, a blind clairvoyant who advised Oedipus on his fate, told him about his prophecy for him. The sight motif makes the audience feel that Teiresias is the one who is well-sighted and Oedipus the one blind. Oedipus was blind to terror and his mistakes he made. The penniless man is used to describe Creon, who once was a nobody in the beginning, and he rose to the throne and became king in Exodos.

The sight motif connects deeper into the thoughts of the audience, by attacking them with a rhetorical question, making them think what the characters did and why.

The rhetorical question impacted the audience’s perspective in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. The question was interpreted in this quote: “Who bears more weight of joy than mass of sunlight shifting in images, or who shall make his thought stay on that down time drifts away? I think this means that the audience has to take the world in perspective and

think
outside the box. The shifting sunlight could represent people trying new things and breaking barriers, while the drifting thought of time could represent the focus that a person is having on a single object. I think this question is targeted towards Oedipus’ spread-out personality, since his personality is related to the shifting sunlight in images.

The dystopian environment in Oedipus Rex is affecting the characters like Iocaste, Oedipus, and Creon in many ways that is clearly shown in the Exodos. For example, Oedipus’ rage after Iocaste hung herself led to this realization of himself and what he had been doing all along. Oedipus raged, “No more, no more shall you look on the misery about me, the horrors of my own doing! Too long you have known the faces of those whom I should have never seen. Too long been blind to those for whom I was searching!” This was the quote when Oedipus finally saw the mistakes he made all along, and his anger was the cause of that. Sometimes, people have to bring out a trait to realize something or to succeed.

All the chaos, all the terror, all the realization leads to one, one critical question. In Oedipus Rex, how does development of a motif create a theme? The theme I described the book in was a dystopian society, and a sight motif helps develop this theme, since most of the characters started out sightless and unaware, a perfect example of people who are living in a dystopia. The sight motif both develops and solves the theme, all characters flailing in realization in Exodos.