Maladies Failed Saviors: Sophocles\' \"Oedipus

¶ … Maladies

Failed Saviors: Sophocles' "Oedipus the King" versus Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies"

Both the ancient Greek drama "Oedipus the King" and the short story "Interpreter of Maladies," by Jhumpa Lahiri portray societies and families in states of turmoil. Suffering people appeal to outsiders to redeem them, but to no avail. In "Oedipus the King," the city of Thebes is afflicted by a terrible plague. The city appeals to the outsider figure of King Oedipus, who solved the riddle of the Sphinx, to find out who brought the plague upon the city. Likewise, in "Interpreter of Maladies," the tour guide Mr. Kapasi lives in an impoverished city whose great monuments have been reduced to rubble. The American Indian tourist Mrs. Das sees the tour guide as a potentially saving figure that can redeem her own lost sense of ethnic and moral identity. But both Kapasi and Oedipus emerge as failed savior figures by the end of their respective stories.

Decay is evident in both locations at the beginnings of both tales. Although Mr. And Mrs. Das have brought their children to see the Temple of the Sun at Konarak, it is now filled with rubble. The Chandrabhaga River is dried up. At the beginning of "Oedipus the King," Thebes is suffering a plague. Mrs. Das, trapped in a failing marriage, looks at Kapasi as a romantic figure because of his regular work as a translator in a doctor's office. The citizens of Thebes are convinced that Oedipus can save them, because he saved them from the previous affliction of the Sphinx. In both situations, foreigners are seen as saving figures because of their apparent strangeness and their romantic professions, either of being a translator and tourist through old sacred places, or a great and wise king, born in a strange land.

The irony of both stories is that neither Oedipus nor Kapasi are really foreign to the people that idolize their wisdom. Oedipus was born in the city of Thebes to King Laius and Queen Jocasta. He was abandoned at birth because it was foretold that the boy would kill his father and marry his mother, thus he thought he was a foreigner to Thebes, until a blind prophet tells him otherwise. Mr. Kapasi and the Dases are all Indian, but in the interpreter's eyes, Mr. And Mrs. Das are foreigners because they dress and speak like Americans. Mina Das sees Kapasi not as a romantic partner, as he desires her to see him as, but as a kind of romantic confessor, who will wash her clean of her sins, much as the citizens of Thebes see their king.

Eventually, when Oedipus' unintentional sin of marrying the queen of Thebes and killing the former king is revealed to the city, the citizens realize that Oedipus is not the great man they hoped he would become, and their illusions are shattered. Oedipus' own illusions about himself as a wise and saving figure of the city are shattered, as he must obey the banishment he laid down for the person who brought the plague upon the city. Mrs. Das must also come to terms with the fact that confessing to Mr. Kapasi will not ease her of the guilt she feels that her husband did not father her children, and Mr. Kapasi must realize he is not the object of her adoration.