Odipus Rex blog post #1
By Omar Andre
I just finished Oedipus Rex. Here’s a quick summary of what happened after the events of the first blog:
Oedipus started looking frantically into any connections to his past that he might have, but while he calls for a servant that might have known more, a messenger appears with the message that Oedipus’ father (as far as he knows) is now dead, and not by his hand. Oedipus is relieved because now the prophecy that he will kill his father is now not true, but then the messenger reveals that he actually delivered Oedipus to this recently deceased person, so now Oedipus, very much against his wife’s wishes, becomes again obsessed with investigating his past. It’s also worth noting that here it is very implied that this is a conscious choice he makes. Investigating his past he discovers that his real father was the past king, he also did kill him and marry his own mother. After this he finds that his wife / mother killed herself, and he gouges his eyes out. Then he leaves with a prophet to ask the gods to let himself be exiled into a mountain never to see anyone again.
The two main questions I got when finishing this book were: what specifically was the tragedy, and why did the tragedy occur. The tragic prophecy said that Oedipus would do two things, kill his father and marry his own mother, but to be honest I didn’t notice those things being frowned upon in the story. I know this is a strange thing to write when the ending was about Oedipus becoming devastated by him discovering he did those things, but what I mean is that the story focused more on the shamefulness stemming from those actions rather than those actions themselves being bad. I think this is most apparent with the second part of the prophecy, Oedipus marrying his own mother. Ignoring the fact that it’s his own mother, the age difference is questionable at best, right? If he’s her son, that means she’s way older, but this is not touched upon. Now, they also had children, which is also incestuous, obviously bad, and to me it would seem natural that at some point in the story Oedipus might be worried about physical conditions that might be inherited by his children because of this, but this is not really the case. Even when he’s directly talking to his children at the end, he worries for their future because of the shame that their family will carry, not that they won’t have a grandpa, or a mom, or a dad, no, his first and only worry is how they’ll always bear the mark of coming from a dishonorable family. This is strange, strange in the same way that the prophecy is. The prophecy doesn’t physically change anything, at the end of the day, he was still married to the same woman, his children would physically stay the same, the man he killed wouldn’t have come back from the dead, so what does the prophecy change? The thing that the prophecy changes is the plague that haunts the kingdom, which was brought down by Apollo, same as the prophecy. And I think this answers both questions, because Oedipus couldn’t have done anything differently, he couldn’t have known better. Oedipus is a victim of a tragedy by Apollo for no reason, even at the end, he’s still at the mercy of Apollo, the only difference is that he now stopped fighting it. One thing that confuses me is why it was implied that it was his decision to learn more or not, because it really wasn’t, he wouldn’t be doing his job as leader if he stopped trying to stop the plague, but during his argument with his wife, he never says that he’s doing it for the kingdom, he’s written as simply obsessed, he’s not doing it for the kingdom anymore, now he just has to know, and I don’t know why. Oedipus Rex is about a man disliked by the gods, forced into a tragic life simply because, and in that way I think that it might be a tragedy about all of us, because isn’t it sad that we’re all bound by the will of gods that would be sadistic enough to do this?
I really liked the second part of this book so it gets:
