Sight In Helen Keller's Oedipus The King

The Greek drama “Oedipus The King” evidently leads to the unveiling of a tragedy. Oedipus, the protagonist of the play uncovers his tragic birth story and the curse he had been baring his whole life. Oedipus is notorious for his personal insight that helped him defeat Sphinx, which lead him to becoming the king of Thebes. He is admired by the people of Thebes and is considered to be a mature, inelegant and a rational leader. From his birth, his story began with a prophecy that Oedipus would grow up to kill his father and marry his mother. Through out the play numerous people, who tell him of his unknown past, visit Oedipus. Blind to the truth he casts them away until a blind man named Therisis gives a sight of truth to Oedipus. As Oedipus learns the truth he realizes the great evil his life carries. After finding his wife and also mother hung in her bedroom, Oedipus blinds himself with the gold pins that held Jocasta’s robe. Oedipus blind to the truth is finally able to see when the old blind man visits him and tells him the truth about his life. Both metaphorically and physically sight plays a significant role in understanding the irony of a blind man seeing the truth while Oedipus who isn’t blind doesn’t seem to the truth that’s right in front of him.

The use of symbolism such as the physical and emotional meanings of blindness can describe different meanings behind elements of the story. In the critical essay, the author discusses why an author might choose to make a character bling and what it means. Diane Andrews Henningfeld, the author of the critical essay explains, “clearly the author wants to emphasize other levels of sight and blindness beyond physical.” Blindness can be more than just the levels of physical sight and the author wants that to be understood. The author wants to emphasize and make it very clear that other levels of sight and blindness exist like not seeing the beauty in life and being blind to it beyond just being able to see with your eyes. The quote can feel something about the characters traits and how they can be so opposite from their physical abilities. This quote Conveys the facts. People can see in different ways. It is stated that,“although he is blind, he ‘sees’ how to get along with others in profound and important ways. By contrast, the narrator, although sighted, does not see how his isolation damages himself, his wife, and their relationship. He is

When you think of blindness you think of sight and when you think of ignorance you think of knowledge. Throughout the play Oedipus, sight and blindness imagery is very noticeable, along with ignorance and knowledge. Sophocles creates Oedipus as a character of ignorance, confidence, and good insight. The story starts out as Oedipus is the son of King Laius and Queen Jocasta. The oracle told the parents that their son would kill his father and marry his mother. The parents refused to let this happen and sent the servant to pin Oedipus’s feet together and leave him on the mountain to die. The messenger knew this was not right and stepped in immediately to help the poor child. As Oedipus grew older he found out the truth about his life and why certain things happened. Over time, Oedipus's blindness shows him the lack of knowledge he knew about his true life story.

Many people make an assumption they are not blind to life itself whether ignorance plays a part or pride. In Cathedral by Raymond Carver, it describes a few myths that society has portrayed and opinions of the visual impaired. The main focus is getting to know the person before drawing a conclusion. Its not fair to anyone to be neglected whether you are visual impaired or have the functionality of what is considered to be a normal human being.

She discusses those who have recently acquired the ability to see and how this affects how they interpret the new world around them. With no preconceived knowledge or ideas about what they are seeing, “vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning” (24). While our minds use what we already know to interpret and comprehend what we see, those who see for the first time have no previous knowledge telling them what they are looking at. Their minds are blank canvases, interpreting each line, shape, and shadow, attempting to piece every aspect of what their eyes are seeing to understand the full picture. While we would simply glance at an object, allowing our mind to fill in the details of what we are seeing based on the image we already have in our minds, the newly sighted do not have the ability to see in concepts as we do. Most of us cannot “remember ever having seen without understanding” (27) yet we still have the ability to learn how to see like this to an extent. Artistic talent aside, upon asking a newly sighted person and an artistically untrained person who had been seeing their whole life to draw the same object, the newly sighted person would have the ability to draw what they were truly seeing while the average person would draw what they knew they were seeing, ignoring the true shape and shadows of the object in front of them. Upon asking someone who has been trained

The theme of sight and blindness is undoubtedly important to notice while reading Oedipus the King. The number of times the words “see” or “blind” are in the play make it make it undeniably obvious that they are significant. The theme is developed throughout the dialogue, through characters such as Tiresias and Oedipus, and also directly in the irony of the play. It is important in a play about the truth because almost every character was “blind” to the truth. All of the characters, except one, can physically see, but mentally cannot see the truth.

When one thinks of being blind, they think of someone who literally can not see, but one can also be blind by lacking perception or awareness. People who have sight and yet are blind is clearly seen in the book, To Kill a Mockingbird. To Kill a Mockingbird is a story based in the 1930’s when racial issues are heavily present. In the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, and throughout history, people or groups of people have existed who can literally see the world around them, and yet are blind to the truth; but, as seen in the novel, some of these people’s eyes can be opened to the truth either by empathy or experiences.

Oedipus Rex is a play about the way we blind ourselves to painful truths that we can’t bear to see. Physical sight and blindness are used throughout the play, often ironically, as a metaphor for mental sight and blindness. The play ends with the hero Oedipus literally blinding himself to avoid seeing the result of his terrible fate. But as the play demonstrates, Oedipus, the man who killed his father and impregnated his mother, has been blind all along, and is partly responsible for his own blindness.

Blindness and Sight Motifs in Oedipus the King In life, there are numerous situations in which people can be "blind to reality" and in Oedipus the King, it is very distinctive. One character greatly exemplifies the concept of blindness and sight and that is Tiresias. When he says, “You are murderer, you are the unholy defilement of this land,” (21) it shows how Tiresias sees the prophecy’s truth. Though physically blind, he is able to see what Oedipus' truth to his origin is, and metaphorically sees what Oedipus cannot.

One of the many symbols Sophocles portrays throughout the play is sight and blindness. Sight represents how Oedipus had eyesight, but was still “blind” to the truth of himself throughout most of the play. He was both hesitant and unaware of the events that built up to

Blindness plays a two-fold part in Sophocles’ tragedy “Oedipus the King.'; First, Sophocles presents blindness as a physical disability affecting the auger Teiresias, and later Oedipus; but later, blindness comes to mean an inability to see the evil in one’s actions and the consequences that ensue. The irony in this lies in the fact that Oedipus, while gifted with sight, is blind to himself, in contrast to Teiresias, blind physically, but able to see the evil to which Oedipus has fallen prey to. Tragically, as Oedipus gains the internal gift of sight, he discards his outward gift of sight. Sight, therefore, seems to be like good and evil, a person may only choose one.

In a way he was similar to a child, blind to the world around him and carefree. As his story progressed, he began to mature into a teenage stage and become more aware of his surroundings. When Oedipus arrived at the end of his story, he finally began to grow into adulthood, fully conscious of his deeds and able to carry their weight. Oedipus, now visionless, possessed metaphorical sight, no longer blind to the fate the gods had decreed for him. Clearly, Sophocles used vision and blindness to illustrate that wisdom, knowledge, and understanding are not attributes limited to only those with

This is Oedipus’ overall solution to his problems, because throughout the play he was blind to them metaphorically, but now that blindness is very much real and the way Oedipus chooses to live.

What is sight? Is it just the ability to recognize one’s surroundings or is there more? Is it knowledge? Is it understanding? Can a blind man see? Can the sighted be blind? And beyond, when the truth is too terrible, do we choose not to see? The phrase "too see" has so very many connotations. One meaning is to know or to understand and the other is based on the physical aspects of things. As humans, we are distracted by the physical world, which causes us to be blinded by the most obvious of truths. Oedipus, the main character in Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex, could not see the truth, but the blind man, Teiresias, "saw" it plainly. Sophocles’ uses blindness as a motif in the play Oedipus Rex.

The most famous scene in Sophocles’, Oedipus Rex, is when Oedipus gouges out his eyes. But, that’s not the only example of sight and blindness in this play. In Sophocles ' plays there was always extensive content where he paid considerable attention to the element of “spectacle” in his plays. When observing the theme of vision, it invites the audience to look at the action with a double perspective, through their own eyes and through the eyes of those on stage. Within this play, sight and blindness are the underlying themes. Sight is commonly associated with light or positive overtones, and blindness is attached to darkness or negative undertones. The approach to describing blindness deals with not only physical blindness but also metaphorical blindness. Oedipus ' blindness changes from bad to worse at different scenes of the play. Although the word "blindness" seems quite simple, it can be very debatable. Blindness or the inability to “see” consist of two elements; Oedipus 's ability to see vs his desire to see. Throughout many scenes, the two elements are used in pattern form. Some scholars mention the two aspects of the play in addition to discussing the theme of knowledge. Lazlo Versenyi, Thomas Hoey, Marjorie Champlain, analyze the play from different perspectives. Versenyi says the play was “a tragedy of self- knowledge”, with the use of terms