38 pages • 1-hour read
Oedipus Rex
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Fate and Free Will
At first, Oedipus Rex seems to be an unambiguous statement on whether human beings are at the mercy of fate or whether they have the free will to direct their own lives. Oedipus does everything he can to avoid the fate Apollo has warned him of, but all to no avail: Destiny sniffs him out and destroys him.
However, the question of fate doesn’t seem to be an open-and-shut case. As Oedipus puts it when he describes his blinding, just because a god has decreed something doesn’t mean that Oedipus is not responsible for his actions:
Apollo, friends, Apollo—
he ordained my agonies—these, my pains on pains!
But the hand that struck my eyes was mine,
mine alone—no one else—
I did it all myself! (241)
Adding to this doubling, though Oedipus endlessly pursues answers even when people are begging him not to, he has a history of not following up on some important questions, like whether Polybus is his biological father, when they first arise.
While the Apollonian prophecies all come true, the play doesn’t go so far as to dust its hands and say, everything that happens was fated to happen, so everyone can just do whatever they most feel like. Its response to the eternal question of the extent to which we can shape our lives is something akin to God’s answer to Job in the Old Testament: Some questions are too big for humans, and the why of suffering is one.
Guilt
Oedipus’s reaction to the revelation of his fate at first seems disproportionately self-blaming. He’s done everything he can to avoid carrying out the horrors Apollo prophesied for him; more than that, he saved an entire city from a monster and, when given kingship, has strived to be a good ruler. We can’t help but feel that it’s not really his fault that, in spite of all his efforts, he still ends up killing his father and marrying his mother. Isn’t his graphic self-blinding far too much of a punishment for what has been, after all, an accident of ill luck? Why does Oedipus feel guilty enough about what’s happened to stab his eyes out while “looking straight up into the points” of the pins? (237)
There’s a strange tension in Oedipus Rex between Oedipus’s burning desire to know the truth of his own history and his avoidance of the same. The more evidence piles up that he is the boy from Jocasta and Laius’s prophecy, the more proof he demands, recoiling in horror, but still searching. But as details mount, Oedipus begins grasping at straws, and by the time Jocasta flees from what she knows is going to be the worst news, he’s fully in denial, imagining that his mother might have just been some unremarkable servant woman. Perhaps, then, Oedipus’s guilt is not over what he’s done, but over refused to accept what he’s known all along. The symbolic choice of blinding—rather than, for instance, castration—suggests that the real crime is refusing to see.
Vision, Sight, and Blindness
Blindness is a prominent and complex symbol in Oedipus. As in many works of literature that followed it (notably Shakespeare’s King Lear), physical blindness is the punishment for metaphorical blindness—the consequence of willful ignorance. But blindness brings with it a paradoxical power. As Oedipus himself puts it, “the blind seer can see” (203): The play’s blind characters, Tiresias and Oedipus, are also those who have finally looked straight into the piercing light of truth.
The eye is a place where the immaterial and fleshly meet. The messenger brings the meaty aspect of the eyeball rather horribly to our attention when he describes the “nerves and clots” that ooze down Oedipus’s face during his self-blinding. But this gory destruction is a way of cutting off the light—the light of vision and understanding, and, not coincidentally, an attribute of the god Apollo, whose whim decrees the play’s terrible action. Oedipus’s blinding is a way of responding to what he’s seen, refusing to see more, and, paradoxically, seeing more clearly as a result.
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