“Oedipus The King”: An Interpretation

In Oedipus the King, Sophocles presents a tragic hero, a man of royal birth and great deeds on whom the gods imposed a heavy fate from which he attempts to free himself, with courage and cunning, but by which in the end he is crushed. The Olympic gods, so human with frailties and passions, could on occasion be deterred from a decision they had made, but whenever their mouthpiece, the oracle, foretold the fate of a human, this fate became unalterable law. Since the discoveries of Freud, we have come to understand that the conflict of “man against fate” is fought, not between man and a force beyond him, but in man himself, between his conscious mind and his unconscious drives. Oedipus's life is ruled by a pattern of repressed affects of his own, now named precisely the Oedipus complex. It is this complex which is his fate. When Apollo's priest foretold that the son of Laius would kill his father and marry his mother, it was the son's Oedipus complex which he revealed. The oracle is the inner voice of the hero: the dark words, the shrouded meanings for which Delphi was known, are the much censored and disguised signals of the hero's unconscious mind.

As Oedipus the King opens, Creon reports the bidding of Apollo to avenge the murder of Laius; again, the voice we hear comes from the unconscious of Oedipus. The call to purge the city of the murderer is Oedipus's cry to confess and be punished. Creon is a spokesman of Oedipus's guilty fear rising from the unconscious into the open. Tiresias, the blind seer, whom Creon summons upon the scene, is another symbol for Oedipus's stirring guilt. He is well chosen for the part, for “blind seer' stands for “repressed memory”, and this explains how Tiresias knows about Oedipus's past and why he has kept silent so long. Oedipus tries to fight off the revelations surging from his unconscious; he becomes indignant and heated, he quarrels with Creon and Tiresias. This quarrel betrays the growing tension within him which he can no longer