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.
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