Essay On Irony In Oedipus Rex

Nevertheless, his fate was sealed by his actions of pride and determination.His pride of conquering the Sphinx led him to the marriage of Jocasta, his mother.According to the legend, one of the local heroes had “been an exiled Theban king who vanished mysteriously in a grove at Colonus and who continued to protect the area until Sophocles' own day”.

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In both cases, the Oracle's prophecy comes true regardless of the characters' actions.

Jocasta and Laius's thought of successfully killing their child at birth so the Oracle's prophecy could not happen and Oedipus's believing that if he fled Corinth, he would not be able to kill his father.

Jocasta kills her son only to find him alive and married to her.

Oedipus leaves Corinth only to find that in doing this he has found his real parents and carried out the oracle's words.

Dramatic irony occurs when the audience knows certain things about the situation that the characters on stage do not.

For example, in Oedipus Rex, the audience knows from the beginning that Oedipus killed his father and married his mother. Colonus had its own legendary heroes, one of which was the center of “three of Sophocles' most famous tragedies”, Oedipus.

He was then challanged into a riddle of his own where he had to find out the truth of his past and the fate of his future.

By solving this riddle he lost all the power and glory, left to be exiled and become a beggar in another land.

In an attempt to comfort Oedipus, Jocasta tells him that the Oracle is powerless; yet at the beginning of the very...

In the Greek tragedy, Oedipus Rex, Sophocles is able to generate the interest of the audience through a new interpretation of the classic myth, and the use of poetic language and dramatic irony.