Oedipus Rex Irony Essay

Irony is important to the making of a tragedy as it heightens the audience’s sense of hopelessness as they watch the characters try to avoid an ending the audience knows is inevitable. In Oedipus Rex, it enforces Sophocles’ message by increasing the contempt the audience feels towards Iocaste and Oedipus for flouting the oracle. There are two separate attempts to evade the prophecy: first Iocasta and Laios's attempt to kill Oedipus and later when Oedipus flees from Polybos and Merope. The paradox is that in trying to escape the prophecy, they set it in motion.

Iocaste’s conviction. This is ironic because the power of fate is ultimately what should make Oedipus fear the possibility that he slept with his mother. Oedipus's rejection of the prophecy

Furthermore, the scene opens with her burning incense to Apollo, the god of prophecy, asking him to convince Oedipus not to trust in the very prophecy Apollo himself has given (48). Sophocles uses irony here to warn the audience of the danger of using the power to fate to convince yourself that ‘everything is going to work out in your favor;’ they will be punished for it just as Iocaste was. Iocaste unknowingly summarizes Sophocles message to his audience: fate rules us. In the real world where prophecies don’t govern reality and in my opinion there is no god, Sophocles message still rings true in that some of the events in our lives are not completely

Unfortunately, he could not see this from the beginning. Sophocles’ use of seeing and eyes is another form of dramatic irony. After Oedipus calls Teiresias “a sightless, witless, senseless, old man” when he tells Oedipus that he is the murderer, Teiresias says to Oedipus “you, with both your eyes, are blind: you cannot see the wretchedness of your life” (20, 22). Oedipus, who is able to see, is the one who cannot see the truth while Teiresias, a blind man, can.

Teiresias foreshadows Oedipus blinding himself when he says “the double lash of your parents’ curse will whip you out of this land some day, with only night upon your precious eyes.” It’s ironic because Oedipus was mocking Teiresias only to be told one day that he will become the same: a blind man who can see the truth. Once he knows the truth, however, he blinds himself because he could not “bear to see when all [his] sight was horror everywhere” (72). Oedipus killing his father and committing incest was the will of fate and of the Gods, but it is not what caused Oedipus his suffering. His suffering began when he found out the prophecy was true, which was his own