Essays on Oedipus Rex

The purpose of this paper is to expound on the plot of “Oedipus rex”. The plot of a play contains a rising activity, falling activity, determination, exposition and peak. The rising activity takes after exposition and works towards the greatest part of a play. The...

It is a well-known fact of life that even the most accomplished people can feel insecure. They suffer self-doubt and, in some cases, are in constant need of support and assurance that they are the great people everyone else perceives them to be. Written by...

Sophocles’ epic poem, Oedipus the King, is a classic elegy that explores how irony can affect ones life and how “fate works more closely” then one would expect. It is due to this that many argue over how to react to the character of “King...

One of the key thematic threads running through the plays of The Oedipus Cycle is the debate regarding the primary importance between the laws of the gods over those of the State. For example, in both Oedipus Rex and Antigone, the eponymous characters are torn...

Throughout the history of literature, authors and playwrights have often employed a foil – a character whose purpose is to create a contrast with the main character that allows the latter’s attributes to cement their presence. Ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles, in his play Oedipus Rex,...

Translations of Sophocles’ play are generally interpreted in one of two ways, ‘Oedipus Rex’, meaning Oedipus the King, or ‘Oedipus Tyrannus’, meaning Oedipus the Tyrant. The exact distinction between the two titles is undefined, though through the lens of Socrates’ five characterizations of the soul,...

Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood is a powerfully unsettling novel concerning a lost man in the grotesque, dark world of the American South. Published in 1949, Wise Blood’s protagonist Hazel Motes serves as a reflection of the power of mythology that continues to assert itself in...

The Greek rationalists’ search for the meaning of life through rational thought instead of the traditional legends marked the first radical shift from mythos to logos. While there was no clean break with either traditional religion or belief in the supernatural, Greek thought as a...

Life is full of things that humans wish to forget. Using blindness as a buffer from reality is a natural response to dangerous stimuli. The types of blindness are easily classified into many categories. These classifications make understanding stories and characters much better. The characters...

As a kind of collective character onto itself, the Chorus in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex assumes multiple functions and qualities that, together, effectively blur the lines between the private and public spheres of the drama. Evidenced in the text by their roles as observers and instigators,...

In Homer’s epic The Iliad and Sophocles’ play Oedipus the King, the characters Andromache and Jocasta are confronted with tragedy and strife. Andromache endures the loss of her beloved husband while Jocasta struggles with the fruition of an ancient prophecy that she will marry her...

Oedipus is a great king whose parents abandoned on the mountainside and choose to kill to stop evil prophecy from happening to them. His name is derived from his “swollen feet” where he was bound to be killed. He is the main character in the...

People might be blinded to reality, and may not understand what truth is, regardless of whether truth is remaining before them. They will never observe truth since they are incognizant in regards to it. In Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, it is anything but difficult to...

Oedipus, our ironic hero, suffered many tragic events that led up to his foretold fate in the play Oedipus the King. Why did he suffer through so much grief and what could one learn from such a taboo play. Unfortunately, Oedipus was a victim of...

Once in our lives there is a minute that we may consider ourselves superior to somebody or something different. There may likewise be a moment that creations a choice prompts an incredible blunder in judgment. In the play, Oedipus the King, composed by Sophocles, both...

Pride, a feeling that has both a good connotation and a negative connotation, it is also a feeling that we can possibly have too much of, so when do we know we have had too much of it? Reading the plays Othello by William Shakespeare...

In the play “Oedipus Rex”, Sophocles shows a hidden connection between man’s free will and fate which the Greek accepted to guide the universe amicable reason. A man was allowed to pick and eventually considered liable for his own behavior. Both the idea of fate...

Effects of the past have come and affected people’s present as well as their future. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the reader sees how no matter how hard Oedipus himself tried to escape his past, it only caught up him sooner or later. Oedipus was sentenced...

The Athenian tragedy Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles is very clear about the fate that awaits the king from the day he enters the world. The choices he made as a way to escape the prophecy about his life, did very little to make him avoid...