Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Who said, "I wouldn’t have come home to kill my father," in Oedipus Rex?

This quotation can be attributed to the character Oedipus in Sophocles's play, Oedipus Rex. In the play, first performed in approximately 429 BC, Oedipus is the king of Thebes. He became the king by unwittingly killing the previous king, who also happened to be his father. Oedipus also decides to marry a woman named Jocasta, who also happens to be Oedipus's mother. Importantly, just as Oedipus does not initially realize that he has killed his father, he also doesn't realize when he marries Jocasta that this woman is his mother.
The given quotation can be found in the later part of the play, after Oedipus has discovered that it was in fact he who killed his father and that he has in fact married his own mother. Appalled with the patricide and incest which he has unwittingly committed, Oedipus gouges out his own eyes. At this point in the play, blind and alone, Oedipus wishes that he had died soon after he was born. That way, he says, he "would not have come to kill [his] father."

No comments:

Post a Comment

What is the theme of the chapter Lead?

Primo Levi's complex probing of the Holocaust, including his survival of Auschwitz and pre- and post-war life, is organized around indiv...