Symbolism In Oedipus Rex

Decent Essays
Oedipus Rex by Sophocles is a Greek tragedy that explores the mysterious murder of former king Laios of Thebes, cleverly connecting the “whodunit” mystery to the “human condition”, or incomplete knowledge. Using pervasive irony, symbolism, and other literary devices, Sophocles innovatively intertwines the murder mystery and the tragic hero 's quest for self-knowledge, paradoxically creating the illusion of progress when there 's only reflexive movement.
From the very beginning, Sophocles sets the duality between revealed knowledge and empirical knowledge, with the juxtaposition of the omniscient Apollo’s altar and the human, apparently powerful, human protagonist’s entry into the play. This simultaneously sets Oedipus en route on two journeys that are ironically inseparably intertwined. Determined to rid the once thriving city of Thebes of a
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Oedipus has fallen, losing perhaps the most important symbolic sensory organ, but gaining all the insight he desired in a state of ignorance, learning his origins and the fate he has been assigned to; dying as a ‘false’ Oedipus and reborn as the now revealed ‘shadow’ Oedipus, Oedipus has now reverted from adulthood to birth as allusive to the Sphinx 's riddle, while gaining the knowledge that all, but the gods were excluded from: his own identity. Entering the play as a honorable yet ignorant man of intellectual prowess and leaving as a revealed murderer and lover of his mother, Oedipus completes the ‘anagnorisis, ‘peripeteia’ and ‘catharsis’ aspect of a Greek tragedy almost simultaneously, drawing pity from the audience who knew each move towards progress was a move towards his birth and knowing his revolting

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