The Role Of Honor In Antigone

Sophocles achieves subjectivity of the events in the play by explaining the many points of view in the story, but also gives their bias through the characters’ actions and dialogue. Using these multiple outlooks, Sophocles provokes his audience, the people of Greece, to reconsider their ideas of honor. Antigone wants honor so badly that she kills herself for it, so it is still considered honorable now? Sophocles’ Antigone using different perspectives, including the chorus, the King, and Antigone, to challenge the public perception of honor. The chorus of Antigone functions as the opinions of the town. Throughout the play, they set the scene for the audience, such as when they explain the deeds of Polynices and Etocles (Sophocles 5). The story

They add philosophical thinking to the play, so it is more than just a spell of suicides with no meaning, which it may look like to a random viewer. In essence, the imitated public educates the actual public. The chorus thinks that Antigone’s wish for her death to be noble is just gross pride, which is shown through her actions. If the chorus was based on the average Greek town of that time, the general public would have probably thought the same way. This means that the audience would have also thought that Antigone was too concerned about achieving honor in an artificial way. The chorus gives meaning and the thoughts of a collective group to the reader or viewer to enhance their experience and understanding of the

Sophocles purposefully wrote Antigone’s character to challenge the societal belief of honor in Greece. Antigone gives the people a chance to reevaluate their long held belief that an honorable death can only come from something unplanned, usually a fight. She is very shallow in her hopes to be dead solely for the honor of it, and the chorus detects this and alerts Creon. Since Creon revoked the death note in time, she kills herself as the only way out of the situation (44). Her suicide took all the honor out of her death and make it more like an escape. In Antigone’s situation, suicide was the easy way to achieve the honor she so desperately wanted, instead of deserving it by becoming a