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Oedipus The King Literary Analysis Essay

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Oedipus the King Literary Analysis Jennifer Tincher When something horrible happens your first reaction is to blame yourself. What if the blame actually lies with the almighty beings? Tragedy is a central idea in Ancient Greek work. Usually it is brought on through a flaw in a character being exploited. In Oedipus The King by Sophocles the horrible events that transpired were influenced by the characters. However, the main cause was ultimately the gods. Sophocles wrote this play around 429 BC in Athens, Greece and was one of the most celebrated playwrights of the era. The play centers around a royal family and the hidden horrors of their relations to each other with Oedipus having unwittingly killed his own father and married his mother. Without the gods there would be no horror and the land would …show more content…

He is stubborn in resisting the truth but he still seeks for it and that is his final undoing. Wanting to know the truth is not necessarily a bad thing but it is often the cause for bad things to happen. Oedipus is a key example of this when he finally realizes that he was the one who killed his father when he is faced with his dead wife and mother. He reacts harshly to this, stabbing out his eyes and banishing himself all over again. There is no denying that Oedipus caused a lot of his pain himself with no one else to blame.
To close, Oedipus’ curse was caused by the gods but his pain was a consequence from himself. He banished himself and stabbed his own eyes, but he also married his mother and killed his father. Despite this, it is known that those events would not have happened if the gods had never said anything. It is a harsh story but it brings out good questions about blame and cause that I hope have been cleared up. The fate of Oedipus was not his own but he caused a disruption of a nation that could have been

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