Oedipus the king 3
Oedipus the king 3“OEDIPUS THE KING”
The feature of the tragic hero as exemplified in Sophecles’ “Oedipus the King” makes the tragic character a great paradox. For unlike most, the tragic hero emerges as anything but a social person. He may begin that way, motivated by a genuine desire to help the community, as Oedipus, but what emerges in the course of the action is that he is actually, deep down where it really counts, far more concerned with himself, his own demands for justice on his own terms, than in compromising his desires with any awareness of ethical norms. He is, in fact, far less concerned about his own survival in the community than he is about being right, seeing things through to the very end.
What Sophoclean tragedy insists upon, however, is that this attitude, this ultimate expression of my own freedom to express myself, to demand from the world that it answer to my conceptions of myself, leads by a step-by-step inevitability to self-destruction. For the cosmos is a fatally mysterious place, not particularly compatible with such heroic self-assertion. And the human being who sets himself or herself up to live life only on their own terms, as the totally free expressions of their own wills, is going to come to a nasty end. However grand and imaginatively appealing the tragic stance might be, it is essentially an act of defiance against the gods (or whoever rules the cosmos) and will push the tragic hero to an act of inevitable self-destruction. We cannot have life...
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