Theme of Excessive Pride in Oedipus the King - Essay Example

Oedipus the King Much of Greek tragedy follows a consistent pattern that was once identified specifically by one eloquent orator. According to Aristotle, every tragedy is structured around three key events. These include hamartia, anagnorisis and peripeteia. The idea of excessive pride plays a monumental role in Greek tragedy appearing as hamartia and is thus the driving force for the rest of the action. Pride in itself, can be seen as a positive attribute, but when it is expressed in arrogance and defiance of fate and the gods, it becomes a fatal flaw that leads to a character’s downfall. Aristotle (1998) stated “the tragic hero falls into bad fortune because of some flaw in his character of the kind found in men of high reputation and good fortune such as Oedipus.” In this statement, he indicates Oedipus had a flaw that, because of his high station, would ultimately cause his demise. In this essay I will argue how Oedipus from Oedipus the King by Sophocles is a protagonist driven by the passion of pride and how this largely contributes to his own downfall, placing the discussion within the context of the classical definition of a tragedy. As has been mentioned, the classic definition of a tragedy begins with the driving force behind the action which was referred to as hamartia. Hamartia is commonly referred to today as a tragic flaw (“Aristotle”, 1998). It is the concept that a noble man will fall not as the result of a vengeful god or violation of the god’s laws per se, but rather as a result of some inherent flawed portion of his character that causes him to act in a specific way or make a particular mistake in judgment. In much of Greek tragedy, this tragic flaw appears in the form of an excessive pride on the part of the protagonist that renders them incapable of listening to the counsel of others or of correctly perceiving the events taking place around them. This behavior or mistake will be the actual cause of ruin thus illustrating that the fall of great people is not necessarily the will of the gods but are instead manifestations of the gods allowing humans to act of their own accord, for better or worse. In Oedipus the King, the action opens as Oedipus is approached by plague-stricken masses asking help from him as king. When he sees his people gathered around him as if he were a god, his response to them is “What means this reek of incense everywhere, / From others, and am hither come, myself, / I Oedipus, your world-renowned king” (4-8). Although the people of Oedipus’ day did turn to their kings to cure all societal ills, Oedipus here is taking an extra step in his own opinion of himself by taking on the persona of a god. His pride in his role is evident in the words he speaks in which he seems to be almost condescending to them for appealing to other forces than himself in their burning of incense to cloud the air. His lordly manner is revealed in his further patronizing suggestion that he has come before them as a benevolent father might appear before his humbled children, gracing them with his personal attention in the matter brought forward. His last line, referring to himself as the “world-renowned king” helps to underscore that streak of pride even this early in the play. It is also obvious, with a touch of foreshadowing and an inference of inflection, that Oedipus is not secure in his position as king. This is evidenced by his tendency to pronounce his greatness to the people, as if finding it necessary to remind them, not only of his own importance as a person, but also just who he is in relation to themselves. Personal experience has shown when people insist on being known by their title, they are not overly secure about its authority. Throughout the remainder of the action, Oedipus’ personality clearly reflects a continued pride and a determination to force things to go his way. The people of Oedipus’ day (and Socrates) placed great emphasis on the predictions of the oracles, priests and priestesses who were said to be able to envision the future yet who were equally known to speak in riddles, sometimes obscuring their meaning beyond any hope of sensibility. When Oedipus received his own prediction that he was doomed to kill his father and marry his mother, he was determined to avoid this fate by taking his future in his own hands. As a result, he left his homeland in Corinth for the further realm of Thebes. He experiences the typical dangers while on his travelers, meeting with strangers and being involved in a fatal battle in which only the other side lost, and encountering a seemingly unanswerable riddle delivered by the Sphinx. When he is able to solve the riddle of the Sphinx, a task that had not been accomplishable by anyone else, his natural pride in his own abilities rose to a new level. This is reinforced by the fact that he then became the king of Thebes and married Jocasta, the widowed queen of Thebes. Oedipus is confident that he has outwitted fate because he and Jocasta have several children together and the kingdom prospers, indications of prosperity that could not have occurred had he been forced to act out his foreseen doom. However, in promising to find the murderer who has caused the plague, Oedipus shows that his pride has become so great he feels a mere announcement will be all it takes to bring the long-hidden murderer to justice: “Well, I will start afresh and once again / Make dark things clear” (139-140). He seems to think he is better than all other men and even the gods in that he will be able to find this person who has evaded capture for so long where the best efforts of others have always failed. When the blind prophet Teresias, a highly respected counselor, is finally driven to indicate that Oedipus was the murderer of King Laius at the continued abuse of Oedipus himself and against Teresias’ better judgment, Oedipus’ pride again steps in his way, preventing him from believing the possibility of the truth. Despite this, that same pride urges him to continue solving the riddles of his own parentage, an undertaking that can only have unhappy consequences. The second condition of a class Greek tragedy is anagnorisis following hamartia. Although the fatal flaw such as Oedipus’ pride might not immediately appear as an error in judgment as it follows logically from one stage of the story to another, it will eventually become clear that without this, the tragedy would not have occurred. Indeed, without the fortitude provided him based upon a health self-confidence which must inherently involve some sense of pride, Oedipus would not have been able to elevate himself to the position he enjoys as the king of Thebes. While the audience begins to realize the truth of the situation long before Oedipus, making any kind of retraction or softening of prescribed punishments possible due to the very public and well-known nature of the announcements, eventually, the main character must also realize the folly of his ways. This eventual clarity of perception is what is referred to as anagnorisis. In Aristotelian terms, this word translates to mean recognition (“Aristotle”, 1998). For the audience, this is represented by the usually sudden realization on the part of the protagonist that he is the primary cause of the suffering or detrimental situation in which he finds himself. This epiphany can reveal not only the true role of the protagonist in the wrongs occurring, but also the true nature of the characters around them. It is easy to see the irony that if Oedipus had not been so determined to escape and prevent the prophecy as it had been foretold, he would have not fulfilled it by accident. This is foreshadowed by Creon just before Jocasta and Oedipus finally discuss the various events of her former husband’s death and Oedipus’ experiences prior to his arriving in Thebes, the discussion that finally reveals the connections. Creon tells Oedipus, “You are obstinate— / obviously unhappy to concede, / and when you lose your temper, you go too far. / But men like that find it most difficult / to tolerate themselves” (814-819). In this one short statement, he sums up the entire tragedy. He illustrates Oedipus’ stubbornness and pride in being unwilling to concede his own complicity in events he has not yet heard the details of. As a result of his own impatience and driving desire to bring honor and further pride to his name, Oedipus becomes excessive in his proclamations regarding motives and punishments to be handed down. Finally, as Creon indicates, once the truth is known by Oedipus himself, it doesn’t matter what Jocasta might do to try to hide the facts from the world, that it is known by them is already more than can be born. Before he’s even fully realized the extent of his own sins, Oedipus is shaken into a realization of where his pride has brought him. Where before he was proud enough of his accomplishments, thinking of them only as a means of bolstering his own ego, he now looks back upon the quarrel he had where three roads met as a fateful event that sealed his own doom: “a curse / I laid upon myself. With these hands of mine, / these killer’s hands, I now contaminate / the dead man’s bed. Am I not depraved? / Am I not utterly abhorrent? / Now I must fly into exile and there, / a fugitive, never see my people, / never set foot in my native land again” (983-990). As the truth becomes more and more difficult to avoid, Oedipus only pursues it with greater urgency, even as Jocasta begs him to stop and allow the case to fall unsolved. Yet again, Oedipus’ pride prevents him from allowing even himself an escape from justice. He recognizes his actions as having taken place by too much confidence in his own abilities to avoid his destiny, yet he also cannot allow himself to mend his ways that are surely bringing him to the greatest doom. The idea of the recognition of the fatal flaw as anagnorisis leads naturally into the third element of class tragedy, that of peripeteia. Literally translated, the word means something akin to a sudden reversal based upon logic and intellect (“Aristotle”, 1998). As Aristotle used it, it meant the sudden reversal of fortunes for the protagonist that was at once surprising to the audience, but that also followed naturally as the result of prior actions and events. Although this concept could be traced through the protagonist’s character, in that the character himself suffered internal ruin as a result of their discovery of such a deep-seated flaw within themselves where they little expected to find one, it was more often than not used to apply to external circumstances. This made it possible for the audience to see the danger of ignoring internal flaws as well as understand that failure to address such flaws could lead to highly disastrous and impossible to hide results. In response to his the revelations not only that he himself was the true murderer of the old king as well as the understanding that he was also the son of that king and his own wife, Oedipus can no longer justify his sense of pride in himself. Everything he’s done has been done as the slave of destiny, he has avoided nothing. In the process, he has also committed some of the greatest sins imaginable to him – defiled his mother’s bed, murdered his father and spawned monstrous children born of incest and most probably containing severe internal aberrations of their own. Incidentally, these are carried out in the sequel play in which the two boys kill each other in a bid for the throne and Antigone kills herself rather than wait for the death sentence pronounced upon her by Creon to take effect as the result of her own pride. Rather than face the truth of his being and unable to take the severe wound to his pride, Oedipus stabbed out his eyes with broaches and walked away from Thebes forever, thereby sealing his doom through further prideful actions. Peripeteia has Oedipus walking away from Thebes a blind, homeless beggar rather than the respected king he should have been based upon his more noble qualities. While this is a surprise, it is nevertheless a logical possible conclusion to the events that have taken place. Thus, the theme of excessive pride is carried throughout the play as both the aspect of Oedipus’ character that drives him forward and leads him to destruction. Seen as it is throughout the various elements of the classic tragedian format of first demonstrating a noble characteristic to tragic proportions, then becoming aware of it and then suffering as a result of it, it cannot be missed that Sophocles was trying to illustrate to his audience the dangers of an absence of humility and common sense. This is, in some sense, what Aristotle was trying to communicate regarding the purpose of tragedy, which he describes as “an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play … through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions” (Aristotle cited in Friedlander, 2005). By illustrating the various things that can go wrong when one believes, through their own puffed up sense of themselves, that they are capable of anything, Sophocles hoped to cause some of his more illustrious audience members to remain more humbly in touch with the truth as a means of avoiding Oedipus’ fate. Works Cited “Aristotle.” Critica Links. (1998). The University of Hawaii. May 21, 2007 Friedlander, Eric. “Enjoying Oedipus the King by Sophocles.” The Pathguy. (January 30, 2005). May 21, 2007 < http://www.pathguy.com/oedipus.htm> Sophocles. Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra. Oxford World’s Classics. Ed. Edith Hall. Oxford University Press, 1998. Read More