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How Does Sophocles Use Dramatic Irony In Oedipus The King

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Sophocles wrote the play Oedipus the King around 430 BC. It was written and produced in Athens, Greece. The intended audience of this play was Sophocles’ fellow Greeks. He wanted to reach out to all of the citizens. Sophocles shows his audience that fate cannot be overcome. In the opening of Oedipus the King the people of Thebes are suffering. Their crops and cattle are not doing well and their women are not able to bear new children. Oedipus sends Creon, his wife Jocasta’s brother, to seek advice on how to save the city from Apollo at his Pythian temple at Delphi. Creon tells Oedipus that Apollo has told him that they must drive out a pollution from their land. This pollution to be driven out is the man who killed the previous king, Laius. …show more content…

The audience would have had an idea of who the calamity would fall on from the beginning. It was known back then that a king was connected to his land and if a famine or plague were to fall upon the land it was because the king was cursed or corrupted. In this case Thebes is suffering from a famine and disease. This connection would have been made then that something was not right about the king. There are many references to eyes, sight, light, and perception foreshadowing what is to become of Oedipus. Oedipus tells Teiresias he is being blind in the mind and ears in addition to being blind in the eyes. The irony there is that Oedipus himself is being blind in the mind at the moment and later blinds his eyes and claims to wish he could do the same with his ears. Teiresias tells Oedipus outright that Oedipus himself is the killer of Lauis. His blindness to the truth is another event foreshadowing his later condition. When speaking of how he will seek out the murderer Oedipus claims he will fight in Laius’ defense as if for his father. He also places a curse on the murderer that he may “wear out his life in misery to miserable doom!” in lines 268 and 269. Both of these comments in his speech foretell later events in the play of him finding out Laius is his father and his life falling apart before him. Everything he thought he knew turned out to be a lie and his wife and mother commits suicide because she cannot bear what has come to

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