Who Is Oedipus A Tragic Hero

Oedipus Rex is a fictional Greek story written back during the Ancient Greece era with all the booming of the literature, art, and so on. Oedipus is the King of Thebes and has become their next king after solving a riddle from the sphinx. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Oedipus demonstrates the characteristics of a tragic hero. The first characteristic of one of three characteristics that Oedipus demonstrates is that he must understand his doom and face the fact that his fate was discovered by his own actions. Oedipus hears from an old, blind prophet, Teiresias, that he is going to blind himself and kill both of his parents. Oedipus is willing to do whatever it takes to remove this curse and go as far away from Thebes as he possibly can (to get away from all that he has just heard). As the story …show more content…
He suffers through the old, blind prophet, Teiresias by telling him that he is going to kill his father and mother as well as go blind. It was one thing to get married young back in ancient times but another to sleep with your own mother. Oedipus slept with his own mother and let's say that his kids are his very own children. That is just beyond disgusting. Once Oedipus realizes what he has been doing with his wife or mother, he decides to gouge out his eyes after walking in on Jocasta’s hanging body. Jocasta had to break the news to Oedipus about what has been going on the entire time, and that's when the story took a complete turn. Oedipus makes himself blind once he stabbed out his eyes with a piece off of Jocasta's necklace. Oedipus runs into Creon and gives him his children and tells him to take better care of his daughters than his sons. Now that doesn't mean to exclude his sons when taking care of them, it means to watch his daughters even closer than his sons. Oedipus then runs away back to his homeland where he thinks he should really