Suicide is a rather startling concept, the ambiguity in reasons behind taking one’s life subject for discretion amongst many different cultures and religions. In Antigone by Sophocles, Haemon challenges the negative connotations of relinquishing to the temptation of eternal oblivion, ending his life as a final act of valor in attempt to bring his father, King Creon, to see his failure to submit to the will of the Gods. Haemon, while a minor character, exposes Creon as the tragic hero of the work in serving as a catalyst to the inevitable downfall of the bull-headed king.
Haemon challenges Creon’s mortal law with that of the Gods, revealing the King’s hamartia to be that of stubbornness in desperate attempt to retain tyrannical power. In
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The loss was told in a rehashing of the state of the deceased, articulating in more finite detail the image of the fallen prince alongside his betrothed. Creon discovers the tragedy of his own fate through the finished tune of Haemon’s sacrifice to true justice, and immediately takes the blame upon himself. The suicide awakens him to his stubbornness; to his fatal flaw of insolent ignorance and failed submission to the will of the Heavens, and the subsequent fall of his fragile laws of man. He acknowledges the guilt being upon his shoulders alone in his apologies to the Gods, seeing that had he stepped down for even a moment he might have seen the truth behind Haemon’s plead. Now he is left amongst the mutilated remains of his family due to his vehement ignorance, isolated in a sea of self-reproach.
Haemon’s part was as Creon’s son, yet his function in accordance to the plot was that of the crucial stimulus to the tragic King’s fall. Creon’s anagnorisis was found in death, for in loss comes awakening; the fate of himself and his family, while clear in the eyes of the sane, lost to the irises of the corrupt. Creon’s definition of justice was rewritten, his successive books of tragedy defined as a result of Haemon’s triggering role in sending him down the path of a tragic