Sophocles, Oedipus the King ,Summary - Assignment Example

Oedipus the King Sophocles’s play, “Oedipus the King”, is a gripping tale of ill fate, blindness, tragedy, and a man’s downfall. Oedipus is the ruler of Thebes, a city now in ruins with deaths and suffering plaguing it day by day. The elders beseech Oedipus to make things right as he had once saved their city before by solving the Sphinx’s riddle. He assures them that this is also his pain and that he has sent Creon to ask the god Apollo for his help. From Creon we learn that Thebes can only be saved when the pollution living inside it is banished.

For the murderer of Laios, Thebes’s previous king, resides in the city and was never found. The case was left uninvestigated because at the time the city was troubled by the sphinx. Oedipus also beseeches everyone to help him find this murderer and calls for the blind prophet Tiresias. When he is summoned, Tiresias tells the king that Oedipus himself is the “ungodly pollution” and that he doesn’t know what a disgraceful and filthy life he is living (Line 353). His shamefulness has caused the grief and suffering through out the city and its residents.

This angers Oedipus and he retaliates by saying that he is conspiring with Creon to overthrow him and take the kingdom for himself. Here we learn that although Tiresias is blind, he sees the truth much clearer than the powerful and envious king, Oedipus. Tiresias goes on to prophesize that before the day is over, the man responsible for everything will be found to be “a resident stranger as it seems, but soon to be revealed as a native Theban” (451). That disgraceful person will also be exposed as a “brother and a father to his children” as well as a son and a husband to his wife (457).

Oedipus tells the blind prophet to leave for he is speaking in riddles which fail to make any sense. Oedipus soon confronts Creon and asks him of his betrayal to which Creon is surprised and angry. He states that he enjoys the royal life without actually having to do any work and he has no intentions of becoming a ruler and usurping Oedipus’s throne. Jocasta, the queen, stops the two from fighting and asks Oedipus why he is so angry. He explains the day’s events to her to which she replies that “no human being has skill in prophecy” (709).

She explains to him that they (Laios and Jocasta) were told by an oracle that their son would kill Laios but it never took place because they tied the baby’s feet and left him in a mountain wilderness to die. Oedipus becomes troubled by the story and proceeds to ask Jocasta the details about the day Laios died. He explains, that when he was living in Corinth, he learned of the terrible fate awaiting him where he would wed his mother and kill his father; so he left the place and came across the three forked road.

They both console themselves to the fact that he couldn’t be the murderer, as the one man who escaped said that they were attacked by a group of men. The two decide to seek him and get the truth from him again Meanwhile Jocasta goes to pray to Apollo where she meets a Corinthian messenger informing her that Oedipus’s father Polybus is dead. He goes on to tell Oedipus that he was adopted and presented to his parents by a shepherd as they had no kids of their own. Jocasta becomes alarmed and rushes inside, while Oedipus still blind to the truth presses him further.

They are joined by the shepherd who was also the only survivor of the attack on Laios and he reveals that Jocasta indeed had given him the baby to discard. After finally having learned the terrible truth, Oedipus runs inside the palace to find Jocasta hanging from a noose, he brings her down and tears at the “golden brooches from the robes which she was dressed in” stabbing his eyes with them (1268). He faces everyone blind and bloodied, a fallen and disgraced man, asking Creon to take care of his daughters and to let him die in the mountains as should have been the case many years ago.

The Chorus ends the play, lamenting how a man mighty as Oedipus, has “struck a wave of terrible ruin”, unhappy and suffering (1524).