Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
The Power of Unwritten Law
After defeating Polynices and taking the throne of Thebes,
Creon commands that Polynices be left to rot unburied, his flesh
eaten by dogs and birds, creating an “obscenity” for everyone to
see (Antigone, 231). Creon
thinks that he is justified in his treatment of Polynices because
the latter was a traitor, an enemy of the state, and the security
of the state makes all of human life—including family life and religion—possible.
Therefore, to Creon’s way of thinking, the good of the state comes
before all other duties and values. However, the subsequent events
of the play demonstrate that some duties are more fundamental than
the state and its laws. The duty to bury the dead is part of what
it means to be human, not part of what it means to be a citizen.
That is why Polynices’ rotting body is an “obscenity” rather than
a crime. Moral duties—such as the duties owed to the dead—make up
the body of unwritten law and tradition, the law to which Antigone
appeals.
The Willingness to Ignore the Truth
When Oedipus and Jocasta begin to get close to the truth
about Laius’s murder, in Oedipus the King, Oedipus
fastens onto a detail in the hope of exonerating himself. Jocasta
says that she was told that Laius was killed by “strangers,” whereas
Oedipus knows that he acted alone when he killed a man in similar
circumstances. This is an extraordinary moment because it calls
into question the entire truth-seeking process Oedipus believes
himself to be undertaking. Both Oedipus and Jocasta act as though
the servant’s story, once spoken, is irrefutable history. Neither
can face the possibility of what it would mean if the servant were
wrong. This is perhaps why Jocasta feels she can tell Oedipus of
the prophecy that her son would kill his father, and Oedipus can
tell her about the similar prophecy given him by an oracle (867–875),
and neither feels compelled to remark on the coincidence; or why
Oedipus can hear the story of Jocasta binding her child’s ankles
(780–781) and not think of his own swollen
feet. While the information in these speeches is largely intended
to make the audience painfully aware of the tragic irony, it also
emphasizes just how desperately Oedipus and Jocasta do not want
to speak the obvious truth: they look at the circumstances and details
of everyday life and pretend not to see them.
The Limits of Free Will
Prophecy is a central part of Oedipus the King. The
play begins with Creon’s return from the oracle at Delphi, where
he has learned that the plague will be lifted if Thebes banishes
the man who killed Laius. Tiresias prophesies the capture of one
who is both father and brother to his own children. Oedipus tells
Jocasta of a prophecy he heard as a youth, that he would kill his
father and sleep with his mother, and Jocasta tells Oedipus of a
similar prophecy given to Laius, that her son would grow up to kill
his father. Oedipus and Jocasta debate the extent to which prophecies
should be trusted at all, and when all of the prophecies come true,
it appears that one of Sophocles’ aims is to justify the powers
of the gods and prophets, which had recently come under attack in
fifth-century b.c. Athens.
Sophocles’ audience would, of course, have known the story
of Oedipus, which only increases the sense of complete inevitability about
how the play would end. It is difficult to say how justly one can
accuse Oedipus of being “blind” or foolish when he seems to have
no choice about fulfilling the prophecy: he is sent away from Thebes
as a baby and by a remarkable coincidence saved and raised as a
prince in Corinth. Hearing that he is fated to kill his father,
he flees Corinth and, by a still more remarkable coincidence, ends
up back in Thebes, now king and husband in his actual father’s place. Oedipus
seems only to desire to flee his fate, but his fate continually catches
up with him. Many people have tried to argue that Oedipus brings
about his catastrophe because of a “tragic flaw,” but nobody has
managed to create a consensus about what Oedipus’s flaw actually
is. Perhaps his story is meant to show that error and disaster can happen
to anyone, that human beings are relatively powerless before fate
or the gods, and that a cautious humility is the best attitude toward
life.
