So this week we read Antigone by Sophocles. This play took place after Oedipus Rex, and I really enjoyed that one, so I had some pretty high expectations. It wasn’t a let down I guess, but it definitely wasn’t as good as Oedipus. It was still pretty entertaining, Antigone is a pretty boss ass bitch. So basically, the King Kreon is just trying to rule the land and do what he thinks is right by setting a principal. By doing this though, his niece, son, and wife all die. He basically kills his niece which cause his son to go crazy out of anger and kill himself. The queen kills herself out of sadness because her kid just died. Before all of this death happens though, the King realizes what he has done and tries to go save the girl, but it’s too late. This is super tragic because yes, the King is just doing what he feels is right as his duty, but also, it sucks a lot because he caused all of this death. It’s like do I feel bad for Kreon or do I hate him? I think it’s pretty cool that Antigone is this woman that wants to stand up for herself and her brother against the King. That’s pretty cool. Go women am I right.
0 Comments
In the TED Talk, Dan Ariely discusses how our personal decisions aren’t really ours, and are influenced by other people a lot more than we think. I found a lot of his examples/experiments very interesting. Not very surprising, but pretty interesting. It all makes sense, if you aren’t very sure very sure about your decision, you are easily persuaded by the format of the question. For instance, the check boxes on the organ donor sheet in the TED Talk. I think a normal person would assume that the answer that is kind of provided for you is the better one to go with, but that is definitely not the case. Ariely also discussed how adding an inferior topic makes another topic sound a lot better. Adding an ugly Tom to a set of pictures makes regular Tom super hot, or adding an ugly Jerry makes regular Jerry seem really hot. Basically, how you have to experience or see the bad stuff to appreciate the good, which is something Ben talks about all the time. So this TED Talk is basically saying no matter how hard we try, some things are just not in our control. I’m pretty sure this is the part that relates to tragedy. Like in Oedipus Rex, no matter how hard he tried to get away from sleeping with his mother and killing his father, it still ended up happening. So in in tragedy, sometimes stuff happens the characters cannot control, no matter how hard they try to. Oedipus Rex by Sophocles was something that I, surprisingly, really enjoyed. I’m not sure if it was the guy who translated it that made it really funny and interesting, or Sophocles himself, but I found the dialogue really entertaining. The plot was also pretty, well, amusing. To quickly summarize it, there was a guy, Oedipus, who was given away to die when he was very young because his birth mother was told by a prophet that her son would grow up to kill his father, wed, and bed his mother. Oedipus was adopted into a family, but later in life found out about this prophet and in hopes of escaping his fate, he runs away to another town. On that journey he kills some people, one of them happens to be his birth father. In the new town he meets, marries, and has children with a woman who happens to be his birth mother. The knowledge of these people being his parents does not come until the end of the play of course. When I think about what I read in Miller’s article, I relate this play with what Miller said about how tragedy is about having hope in something. In the later half of this play when Oedipus was finally starting to figure out what had truly happened in his life, he continuously tried to find other people or things to blame the misfortune on. Or rather, he was constantly hopeful that he had in fact somehow escaped the prophecy and his fate wasn’t true. The article “Tragedy and the Common Man” by Arthur Miller was probably not written with me in mind. What I mean by that is, if the author were writing this for me, he would have dumbed down some of the more complex sentences because, not going to lie, I kind of couldn’t comprehend some of them. For example I think I read lines 17-21 about ten times before getting a small, and probably wrong, understanding of them. What I could get out of his article though, was about how tragedy applies to anyone and everyone, no matter the social status. Miller says tragedy is so relatable because it’s so personal, and reveals a flaw in the character that a person can connect to. In the end of Miller’s article, he brought up optimism in tragedy, which is something I had never really thought of. I always thought of tragedy as being sad and yes, the author agrees with, but also say that in a way, tragedies show optimism in how the character “automatically demonstrates the indestructible will of a man to achieve his humanity.” The author brings up pathos being what the audience connects with most. A fight the character takes, that will definitely not be won, but is fought anyway, is the optimism that Miller is talking about. That argument actually makes a lot of sense to me, and I think it’s pretty cool. In the TED talk by Alain de Botton, he discussed how people deal with failure and success. A main point of Botton’s talk was who was and wasn’t a loser. Also, how no matter what, some people are more fortunate than others and therefore, those people will have an easier time succeeding. Some bad people will, unfortunately, make it to the top, and good people will be forced to stay at the bottom due to accidents and other things out of the control of anyone. I totally agree with this. In the later part of his talk, a part that stuck with me was when he spoke about how people should have goals that are specific to that individual person, and not what the people around them are trying to achieve. This way, the goals the individual people set will be feasible, and will lessen the failure a person faces. Botton connects all of his points to tragedy by talking about how in tragedy, people do not just watch people suffer, but they sympathize with them for their suffering. An example he uses to tie in tragedy with his talk is Hamlet. Hamlet lost a lot in his story, but because the audience sympathizes with him, they do not refer to him as a loser. I really don't know anything about tragedy except for ancient Greek statues and sadness. When I think of the word tragedy outside of an English class I think of hardcore sadness and misfortune. When thinking about them in English class, I'd expect a tragedy to be a story having to do with just that, but honestly, I would not be surprised if I was totally wrong. I also suspect that I’ve probably learned about tragedies in classes before, and either just not remembered them or been extremely bored by them so I’ve pushed them out of my mind. I really hope it’s the former. After doing some research, to my surprise, I was kind of on the right track. The first few sentences I’ve read about tragedy is kinda frightening. A lot of suffering, pain and drama. Sounds like high school. From what I’ve read, it sounds like the audience is supposed to be entertained by the suffering of the characters. My earlier statement in which I said I might have been bored of this is probably wrong, because this sounds very interesting. As I read more about tragedy from the links that were supplied to me, I’m gathering that people have different perspectives on the word. Aristotle, William Forster Lloyd, and A.H. Thorndike, all took tragedy in different ways, some very different than others, some making more sense than others as well. I think I like Lloyd’s take on it the best, good old plays and that. |
|