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Question
What is ironic about the ending of the play?
Oedipus, it was prophesied when he was a baby, would kill his father and marry his mother. So he was cobbled by his feet and exposed as an infant. The commoner charged with exposing the prince, however, was childless and took pity upon the babe, and reared the child himself. Oedipus as a young man learned by the same prophesy that he would become a patricide and enter into an incestuous marriage with his mother. So he fled what he thought were his true parents, home, and birth.
Had Oedipus not tried to flee his fate, he would never have met his father the King in the road and killed him in an argument. Had the future king of Thebes not tried to flee his...
And he would never have blinded himself, injuring his body as his father tried to kill his own child so many years ago by injuring the baby's foot -- thus resulting in the name of Oedipus 'swollen foot.'
Oedipus' hubris in thinking he could avoid his fate and defy the god's will echoes his father's willingness and hubris to attempt to do the same. Even Oedipus' freeing of the city of his birth from plague is ironic, as his attempt to do so merely brings another, worse plague to the city later on. Thus, the entire play's plot is an exercise in irony as well as a demonstration of the main character's hubris.
However, the play goes even further than these hints in demonstrating the irrelevance of any supernatural force to the story's action when Tiresias mocks Oedipus for suggesting that the blind seer is the source of the plague (Sophocles 27). When Oedipus accuses Tiresias of a being "a conspirator" to Laius' murder due to his reluctance to tell what he knows, Tiresias responds by asking "Sooth sayest thou?" (Sophocles 26-27). While
In shaping his dramatic theory, Aristotle surveyed the drama of his time and developed certain concepts regarding the nature of the tragic hero. The tragic hero must be an important person with a character flaw that causes him to make a great mistake leading to tremendous suffering and a fall from his high status. The tragedy derives from the fact that none of what occurs is the tragic hero's
Tragic Hero begins with an examination of Oedipus Rex. But, while he is the archetype of this particular literary character, Hamlet is, perhaps, the most well developed and psychologically complex of tragic heroes. For the Greeks, all things in life are preordained, which is what makes for the tragedy of Oedipus - his attempt to make his own destiny. Over the course of time, however, while the form of
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