Guilt In Oedipus The King

Both literary and informational texts, Oedipus the King(Sophocles) and “True Crime: The roots of an American obsession”(Mosley), use a central idea to develop a claim throughout the text. A central idea both authors use to support their text is guilt. Guilt builds up the foundation for the theme in both of these texts.

The central idea of Oedipus the King is guilt. Sophocles’ claim for this text is: Even if you are powerful and looked at the person you have guilt. Even if you are not sure if it is there or not you still have somewhere in you. Oedipus is a powerful leader and saved his city from a sphinx by solving a riddle. He ran away from his home trying to escape his fate stating that he would kill his father and marry his mother. Little did he know that the parents he ran away from adopted him. He became king obliviously marrying his real mother and killing a man where three roads meet which turned out to be his real father. At the end of this play, his mother kills herself. A messenger states “I’ll waste no words- know this- noble Jocasta, our queen,

This article explains how guilt, vulnerability, crime, and escaping reality are all things our society will encounter, and its effects on us. This article also says that everyone is guilty of something and that 's how it will be forever and how we start being guilty of at least of one thing as soon as we are born. Concluding that guilt is rather our fate. Walter Mosley states “Everybody is guilty of something. This is a truism of the West. It goes all the way back to Cain and original sin and has been a central topic of discourse among members of society from the construction of the laws of ancient Rome, through the Inquisition, into the Jim Crow system of the South (and North), stopping to wallow in the culture of the Soviet Union, and going right to the rotten heart of the race laws of Nazi