Horror and Self-punishment in Sophocles Oedipus Rex Essay -- Oedipus

Horror and Self-punishment in Sophocles Oedipus Rex An ancient plate portraying Oedipus earreach to the riddle of the Sphinx. Oedipus Rex is a act upon whose qualities of inscrutability and of pervasive irony quickly act to complicate any critical discussion. It is a play of transformations in which things motley before our eyes as we watch where meanings and implications seem to be half-glimpsed infra the surface of the text only to vanish as we try to restoration them in and where ironical resemblance and reflections a wince to confuse our result. The play encourages us to make connections and to draw out implications that in the end we argon pressure to reassess, to question and perhaps abandon.The plays meaning through two oppositions is defined by its stage action and its language, are parallel and complimentary to each other. The play is, in a way that determines our response to its meaning, a sequential experience. Our response is shaped through the duration of its pe rformance.The opening of the play shews us with a gathering, the old and the young, no women, no fully adult males, so that Oedipus is, at once, magnified and isolated. His calm effectiveness is overwhelming and majestic. But on what does Oedipus authority rest? There is a crucial uncertainty here. The opening scenes present us with an image of Oedipus as a political figure, a military personnel king whose power derives from the community he rules, whose perceptions and whose feelings are indissoluble bound up with the experience of the men of Thebes, whose language he speaks and where he belongs.We are swept aside as a gathering panic occupies Oedipus question at hearing mention of a place he remembers, where he once killed a man. If that man was Laius, Oedipus s... ...e vain attempts of mankind to escape the barbarous that threatens them. There is an unmistakable indication in the text of Sophocles cataclysm itself that the romance of Oedipus sprang from some primeval dream -material that had as its content the distressing disturbance of a childs relation to his parents owing to the first stirring of sexuality. At a tear when Oedipus, though he is not yet enlightened, has begun to feel troubled by his recollections of the oracle, Jocasta consoles him by referring to a dream, as she thinks, it has no meaning. It is clearly the key to the tragedy and the complement to the dream of the dreamers father being dead. The story of Oedipus is the reaction of the humor to these typical dreams. And just as the dreams, when dreamt by adults, are accompanied by feelings of repulsion, so too the legend must include horror and self-punishment.