by Jamie Shindler

Created on: April 29, 2008

Oedipus Rex: Victim or Accomplice?

If you've been through high-school literature, chances are you know the story of Oedipus Rex, tragic Greek hero and main character of Sophocles' historic play by the same name. For those who might want a refresher: after learning from the Oracle of Delphi that he was destined to kill his father and marry / sleep with his mother, Oedipus fled his home of Corinth in an attempt to escape his fate. While traveling, he was run off the road by a haughty, proud stranger; enraged and unaware the man was Laios, king of Thebes, Oedipus struck and accidentally killed him with a walking stick. Soon after, Oedipus defeated the riddle of the Sphinx and in true hero fashion was rewarded by the Thebans with their kingship and the hand of their queen, the beautiful Iokaste, in marriage.

Fast-forward a few dozen years, and Thebes is once again threatened, this time by a horrible plague. Told that the only way to cure the illness is to punish the murderer of Iokaste's former husband, king Laios, Oedipus ignores warnings from the prophet Tiresias and investigates the death, only to discover the shocking truth that he himself is the killer. Worse, a messenger arriving with news of his father's death reveals that his flight from Corinth was unnecessary; King Polybus and Queen Merope were not his birth parents at all. They had adopted the infant Oedipus when a shepard discovered him abandoned on a mountainside, his ankles pierced through with a skewer . . . the same place his true parents Laios and Iokaste had left him to die, after being informed of a prophecy that he would slay his father and marry his mother. Thus, just as he was destined to do, the tragic king had come full circle.

There are multiple interpretations of the play's central theme and abundent metaphors, ranging from the Sigmund Freud's complex psycho-sexual ideas to the simpler moral' of predestination and fate. One particular theory suggests that the entire play itself is a metaphor for human emotion that is, the tendancy of feelings such as love, fear and anger to cloud common sense and reason. Indeed, it is the passionate emotions of each player' in the tragedy Oedipus' love of his adoptive parents, Laios and Iokaste's fear of destruction at the hands of their own child, Oedipus' wounded pride and anger in his confrontation with Liaos and his own great fear of actually fufilling the prophecy that led them all to their horrible fates.

Like most great tragedies, the plot is propelled forward by the inability of the characters to separate reason and intellect from their more-base emotions. If Oedipus had returned to the Oracle at Delphi and demanded an explanation, or returned to his parents and insisted on the truth, or paused for a moment and realized he wasn't attracted to his mother' Merope (and likely never had been), then he might have avoided the fateful meeting with his biological father, Laios, at the crossroads. Similarly, if Laios and Iokaste had kept their child and raised him or even just outright murdered him, instead of piercing his ankles and giving him to the shepard to kill neither of them would have been in the positions they finally arrived at. Even something as simple as Iokaste noticing the piercings of Oedipus' ankles and questioning him about them could have reasonably prevented things going as far as they did. But instead, they allowed their passions and primal human nature to rule over common sense, much to their own suffering. This interplay of emotion resulting in tragedy can even extend to the Greek Gods themselves; certainly, Oedipus' "gods" meddled in the calm intellect of their human subjects, sending the noble hero to his doom with their intense emotions.

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