Oedipus the king 3
Oedipus the king 3“OEDIPUS THE KING”
The feature of the tragic hero as exemplified in Sophecles’ “Oedipus the King” makes the tragic character a great paradox. For unlike most, the tragic hero emerges as anything but a social person. He may begin that way, motivated by a genuine desire to help the community, as Oedipus, but what emerges in the course of the action is that he is actually, deep down where it really counts, far more concerned with himself, his own demands for justice on his own terms, than in compromising his desires with any awareness of ethical norms. He is, in fact, far less concerned about his own survival in the community than he is about being right, seeing things through to the very end.
What Sophoclean tragedy insists upon, however, is that this attitude, this ultimate expression of my own freedom to express myself, to demand from the world that it answer to my conceptions of myself, leads by a step-by-step inevitability to self-destruction. For the cosmos is a fatally mysterious place, not particularly compatible with such heroic self-assertion. And the human being who sets himself or herself up to live life only on their own terms, as the totally free expressions of their own wills, is going to come to a nasty end. However grand and imaginatively appealing the tragic stance might be, it is essentially an act of defiance against the gods (or whoever rules the cosmos) and will push the tragic hero to an act of inevitable self-destruction. We cannot have life entirely on our own terms for very long.
What makes Oedipus so compelling is not that he suffers horribly and endures at the end an almost living death. The force of the play comes from the connection between Oedipus's sufferings and his own actions, that is, from the awareness of how he himself is bringing upon his own head the dreadful outcome.
He is looked upon as a hero because of the way he demonstrated his humbleness and his feelings of regret as well as the dignity of men and how it can be achieved in a world of confusion, greed, and power while struggling through the tragedy of his life. In that sense the tragic hero, like the comic hero, learns about himself and about life, but unlike the comic hero, is not willing, even then, to compromise, to abandon the course of action he has initiated and for which he takes full responsibility. Death he prefers to any compromise with his ownsense of himself.
To admire the tragic character requires, not that we like him particularly, but rather that we see in his response to experience something magnificently heroic, an unwillingness to accept any shared understanding of experience, a refusal to compromise with any one else's answer as to what life is all about, a determination to push life beyond all simple ethical explanations and to discover for himself the full meaning of experience. If that desire leads to self-destruction, as it usually does, then that is the price the hero is willing to pay.