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Characters: Good And Evil In Sophocles's Antigone

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Every day our society labels people as either good or bad. As human beings we strive to reach the standard of good, to be a good person, to be the hero of our own story. Yet frequently we fall short. We mess up. The Greek playwright Sophocles brilliantly provided an answer to these moral mysteries in his work, Antigone: “Think: all men make mistakes,/ But a good man yields when he/ Knows his course is wrong,/ And repairs the evil: The only/ Crime is pride” (Sophocles). Understanding what Sophocles is trying to explain in this passage isn’t extremely difficult to decipher. We as humans are all bound to make mistakes. There is no other way about it. But when a good person recognises that they have made a mistake, or have done wrong, they fix …show more content…

The entire driving force of the play is Macbeth’s desperate desire to become king. And in order to achieve that, he must get rid of the current king, King Duncan. He expresses these desires in act one during which he is in a discussion and says aside “Stars, hide your fires;/ Let not light see my back and deep desires./ The eye wink at the hand, yet let that be/ Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see” (I.iv.57-60). From early on Macbeth exhibits these evil minded ambitions. He experiences guilt and questions whether or not he should go through with killing Duncan. If Macbeth were a good man, he would “yield when he/ Knows his course is wrong” (Sophocles), but he does not yield. Macbeth recognises that killing Duncan is wrong, but he does it anyway, therefore making it awfully conflicting to support him, as he is the central character of the play, thus the title. It is the action of killing and going through with his thoughts that makes him good or evil. We all have questionable thoughts go through our heads, but it is the decision to act upon them which makes a person good or the opposite. After the fact, Macbeth does not repair the evil, he does not confess. Macbeth basks in the glory of being the new king. Not only does he give in to the temptation of evil and personal gain, he is too prideful to own up to his wrongdoings and attempt to right his

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