Blindness And Sight In 'Oedipus The King'

Oedipus Rex has many different themes, motifs, and symbols, all of which can be interpreted differently. Blindness and sight are both examples of motifs used in Oedipus. Often in Theban plays, the image of clear vision is a metaphor for insight and knowledge. Both literal and metaphorical references to eyesight and insight are both found in Oedipus. The first blindness that was encountered was Oedipus. A plague had stricken Thebes and citizens gathered outside of his palace asking him to take action. Oedipus’s brother-in-law Creon had already been sent to the oracle at Delphi to learn how to help the city. Cereon returns with the news that when the murderer of the former king of Thebes Laius was caught and exiled, the plague would end. Tiresias, a blind prophet, knew information as to the whereabouts and history of the murder. Tiresias would not respond because the truth would bring nothing but pain. Oedipus curses and insults Tiresias, …show more content…
Oedipus' physical visual deficiency assumed into the entire part of the Greek disaster. The difficulty seeing finished the catastrophe for Oedipus. Each Greek catastrophe should end with the principle characters encountering their own, individual disaster. For Oedipus, this disaster was finding reality and getting to be visually impaired. It finished the predictions that Oedipus got from the visually impaired prophet, Teiresias. Teiresias told Oedipus that he had come into Thebes with his sight, yet he would leave Thebes without it. Oedipus' physical difficulty seeing additionally left Oedipus to the wrongs of his life. With nothing to take a gander at, Oedipus was compelled to contemplate his life and what had happened. He was compelled to manage it. He had the obscurity and the physical agony he had caused on himself as updates and as discipline. Oedipus' physical visual impairment was pretty much as tormenting as his sightlessness to reality. Both were interlaced in one