In Sophocles’ play Antigone, Antigone is punished for burying her dead brother’s body by being buried alive. Antigone gives an emotional speech in which she laments the loss of her youth and her future of marriage and motherhood. In this speech, she employs rhetorical devices like pathos, foreshadowing and extended metaphor. In an attempt to coerce Creon to refrain from burying herself alive, Antigone utilizes the rhetorical device, pathos. She says, “For never had I, even had I been mother of children,” and, “ Cut off from marriage feast, unlasting wife’s true joy, or mother’s bliss, with infant at her breast…” (Sophocles 34). Antigone tries to provoke emotion in Creon by also saying, “ ...I last and far most miserably descend, before my term of life is full…” (Sophocles 33), to bring attention to the fact that she will die young and will be kept from everything she is looking forward to in life. She is saying that she will never marry, she will never have a child, and she will die before it is her time, because of Creon. Antigone is one of Creon’s only family members left alive; Antigone sees family as the most important part of her life, so by talking about how she will never have a family herself, she …show more content…
Foreshadowing is seen in the line, “...I come, cherishing this hope especially, to win approval in my father’s sight, approval too, my mother, in thine, and thine dear brother! For that with these hands I paid unto you dead lavement and ordering and sepulchre-libations; and that now, Polynices, in the tendance of thy body I meet with this reward ” (Sophocles 33), when Antigone reveals that she knows that she is going to die and with that in mind she wishes to be reunited with her parents and brothers in death. This is foreshadowing because when Antigone does die, she is finally reunited with her beloved