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:
I’m about 2/3rds of the way through antigone, here’s a summary of what has happened up until now:
There was a big timeskip, and now all the children are grown up. The story starts right after the death of Oedipus’ sons. The translator’s notes tell us about how one son didn’t want to share the throne, so he exiled the other one, then the other one planned a coup and failed. They both put a spear through each other’s heart. After this, Creon–Oedipus’ brother in law– became king and gave the ruling that son one, the one who had ruled before him, was honorable and deserved an honorable death, and son two, the one who had been exiled, was deplorable and didn’t deserve a proper burial. After hearing of this, Antigone made up her mind to go and give a proper burial to son two, no matter the consequences, which were surely death. Sister two, however, while she believed that it was the right thing to do, she believed it was impossible because she was being held down by the men in charge. After achieving her goal, she eventually gets caught. After this, it is revealed that Creon’s son is Antigone’s fiance. Creon’s son confronts Creon about being so stubborn and not hearing any other opinions.
The way I see the story, it’s about three main ways of thinking: Creon’s appeal and absolute belief in physical authority, Antigone’s absolute belief in unchanging right and wrong through “the god’s unwritten rules”, and Antigone’s sister, that believes in unchanging right and wrong but is forcibly compliant with physical authority. Creon at one point goes into a big speech about how following whatever the biggest authority says is the most rightful thing you can do, because otherwise anarchy rules. At first it might seem like he’s being disingenuous, after all, he’s the one in power and he benefits from the general population believing in his authority, but I believe he truly means what he says because he had served under the first son’s authority without question. Creon is overall painted as a bit of a dictator, when the watchmen first came to him, he was afraid to give bad news to Creon, and he was proven right because he was threatened with death. Creon also took it badly when his son stood up to him and his way of governing. When thinking about Creon in this context, a question arises: Why does he care about justice? Why does he care about any values at all if he believes so strongly his authority itself is righteous? At the beginning of the story, he justified not burying a brother properly by citing the gods and their justice, later in the story, during his speech about authority, he says that authority should be followed even when it’s “wrong”, without question. I think one could take this as him justifying his own actions, but I don’t think so, as I said before, I think he wholeheartedly believes everything he says, so what else could this be? Does he believe the gods are with him or not? At the beginning he does cite the gods’ justice, but later he says the physical authority is good even if it’s doing “wrong”. I actually don’t know the answers to these, but I hope I’m able to answer these questions after reading more of the story. Antigone is a much more straightforward character in my opinion. She follows the gods’ rules, and that’s it. The story also wants us to side with her. When the watchmen caught her, they did so by digging up the corpse of the brother, and then a big storm immediately broke out, and only stopped when Antigone came to “honor” the corpse, telling us that the gods were disturbed by the corpse not being given the proper burial. The other interesting question I got as I read the story was: Why was one brother dishonorable? They didn’t give us much context around the brothers who died, but it seems to me that they were pretty equal. They were supposed to share the throne, the “dishonorable” brother tried to take back the throne, which was promised to him, and his brother did him wrong. I think this is further proved by a line that goes something like “they each had their spears in the other’s breast”, the way in which they died was as equals. In this case, the only reason that Creon wouldn’t like one brother was because he went against authority, and it didn’t matter that the authority was wrong, or the rebellion justified.
I am enjoying Antigone, it seems a bit more of a complex story than Oedipus Rex and I’m very invested in the story and looking forward to the resolution. Because of this, I give it a:
