Oedipus Flaws

Words: 1128
Pages: 5

In Oedipus the King, Sophocles portrays Oedipus as a man who contributed to his own downfall by being the tragic hero. “The problem of knowledge and ignorance, seeing and blindness was analyzed comparatively broadly and precisely in this context” (Allan). Oedipus’s life slowly becomes a string of unfortunate events, due to his tragic flaw, which is blindness. He is blind to the truth about his life because he refuses to believe anyone and by the end of the play he is literally blind.

The city Oedipus rules over is Thebes, which is infested by a plague that the citizens feel he is supposed to fix. Oedipus tells the citizens that he has sent his brother in law, Creon, to find out from the oracle at Delphi how to fix the city. He learns that
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“In the Oedipus Rex, Sophocles had already shown the reverse. The man who sees but one side of a matter, and straightway, driven on by his uncontrolled emotions, acts in accordance with that imperfect vision, meets a fate most pitiful and terrible, in accordance with the great laws which the gods have made” (Barstow). He cannot avoid his fate and not only does he cause himself to be literally blind, he also kills his own father. “In the classical view, Oedipus is a victim of fate and bravery” (Steiner). Oedipus did not intentionally choose for his life to unravel as so, therefore he does somewhat possess the quality of bravery. Upon finding out the truth, he does go a little haywire but in the end it all works out as he finds necessary. Obviously, Oedipus is a victim of fate because if he knew the truth in the first place, none of this would have …show more content…
Oedipus’s life is terribly twisted but that is not why his life has become such a tragedy. The way he reacted to his problems made it even harder to deal with, once he found out the truth. He did not react maturely and in fact, made his situation worse. He was blind to the truth and did not know how to make his life better. Therefore, as the reader we can surely tell that his role of being the tragic hero with the flaw of blindness, contributed to his unruly