Faber contends that Sophocles's Oedipus reacts to the discovery of the truth about his past with the feeling that he had been betrayed by his mother. In a rage he rushes to her room to murder her, but finds that Jocasta had already hung herself. He blinds himself not only out of patricidal and matricidal guilt, but also as a defense against seeing his parents again in the afterworld. The argument is convincingly supported by the text of the play, consideration of self-aggression in Sophocles's work as a whole, and references to the literature on matricide and self-destructive behavior.