Oedipus Rex - Blog Posts

I both love and hate Oedipus Rex because the end is so stupid.

The whole play is (in one interpretation!) about self-identity and the battle between knowing who we are and how we are percieved by ourselves and the world around us. You'd expect for Oedipus to end the play fully relalized and yet...

By blinding himself, which, yes it is out of guilt and is a form of self-flagellation, but it also acts as a way to continue ignoring who he is. Without eyes he cannot see his children, the genetic abominations, nor does he have to see the world he has helped corrupt. He can continue to live in bliss. In his blindness he does not become Tiresias- he is not a prophet- he is just a pathetic man as scared as us to see himself in the mirror.

Yeah sorry about your boyfriend… turns out he’s actually your son you thought you had killed 2 decades ago. Oh yeah he also killed your late husband… yeah the oracle was right

You with your precious eyes —

The gods differ from mortals here not because they are above the law but because they possess the insight to avoid breaking it. This marks the difference between gods and mortals perhaps more deeply than death itself: the gods never find themselves in the position of Oedipus, suddenly and unimaginably guilty. They are able to avoid actions whose consequences they cannot control; mortals risk such consequences in their every action. And perhaps it is even a kindness that transgression and death go hand in hand, that those who cannot die need not sin: for one who has broken the law which even the gods fear, the best thing is to die quickly.

-incest, cannibalism, and the rise of the house of atreus, michael kinnucan

So the ubiquitous counsel of the chorus concerning the hero—look what fortune has done here, she used to be on top of the world, don’t count on happiness, don’t believe anyone happy until he is dead—says more than it seems to. In the last analysis, what can one say of mere mortals? A human is just too partial, too speckled and subject and already-half-gone, for anything to be really true or false of him. Is he happy, is she sad? Maybe, a bit, for a time, but really—who can say, who can even care? That’s how it is for humans, unless and until they are tragic. The tragic hero is complete. You can call him unhappy (miserable, utterly broken) even before he is dead. For an instant he is something like divine. And then he dies, because there’s nothing left to do. The center of every tragedy is the image of a human being who has already died but keeps talking, someone whose face is a mask. Antigone says this explicitly—she is already dead; Oedipus acts it out in gouging out his eyes.

-the gods show up, michael kinnucan

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