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Characterization of Antigone in Sophocles' Antigone

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Sophocles’ tragic drama, Antigone, presents to the reader a full range of characters: static and dynamic, flat and round; they are portrayed mostly through the showing technique.

In “Sophocles’ Praise of Man and the Conflicts of the Antigone,” Charles Paul Segal takes the stand that there are two protagonists in the drama (which conflicts with this reader’s interpretation):

This is not to say that there are not conceptual issues involved in the characters of Creon and Antigone. But the issues are too complex to be satisfactorily reduced to a single antithetical formulation. We must avoid seeing the protagonists as one-dimensional representatives of simple oppositions: right and wrong, reason and emotion, state and …show more content…

Nothing so evil as money ever grew to be current among men.”

The guard exits with the intention of saving his own skin by never reappearing before Creon. But shortly thereafter he again approaches Creon with the startling news that the guilty party has been apprehended in the act of burying Polynices’ corpse: “I have come, though 'tis in breach of my sworn oath, bringing this maid; who was taken showing grace to the dead.” The guard’s recounting of the actions of Antigone develop her character into all of its fullness as a most sentimental and religious person:

And when, after a long while, this storm had passed, the maid was seen; and she cried aloud with the sharp cry of a bird in its bitterness,-even as when, within the empty nest, it sees the bed stripped of its nestlings. So she also, when she saw the corpse bare, lifted up a voice of wailing, and called down curses on the doers of that deed. And straightway she brought thirsty dust in her hands; and from a shapely ewer of bronze, held high,

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