An ancient Greek audience, coming to the theater, would already be familiar with the fate of Oedipus, the king doomed to kill his father and marry and his mother. Thus, the playwright's skill had less to do with constructing unexpected plot twists or a surprising ending, for example, and more to do with telling the story well. One way to achieve this was through the use of dramatic irony: when the audience knows more than the character. Since the audience knew the end already, Sophocles could use dramatic irony to increase their tension; when Oedipus, for example, curses the killer of Laius and proclaims that the murderer will be exiled from Thebes forever, the audience realizes that he's unknowingly cursing himself to such a punishment. The playwright builds tension like this via dramatic irony throughout the entirety of the play until, finally, Oedipus comes to understand that his terrible prophecy has been fulfilled; the truth is out at last, and the audience experiences catharsis: a release of tension that the play has created with the character's ultimate comprehension of truth. In this moment, not only is the audience purged of emotion, but they also have the opportunity to realize one of the play's main themes: man cannot outwit the gods.
Catharsis refers to a purging, or evacuation, of emotions which often evokes a change or restoration of the one experiencing catharsis. Aristotle, a Greek philosopher and one of the most influential thinkers in human history, stated in his own work Poetics: "Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions."
Aristotle is conveying here the power that a high quality Tragedy can have in evoking this catharsis in its audience. Oedipus Rex in particular, which Aristotle praised as an example of a perfect Tragedy, effects catharsis by promoting the feelings of pity and fear in the audience centering around the guilt that Oedipus feels after he becomes blind. When his sight, physically, was perfect, he was blind to the dreadful fate the gods had saddled him with. Once Oedipus had become enlightened towards his true plight, he takes drastic action and gouges out his eyes because he longer can bear the sight of what he had done: "Using Jocasta's brooches, Oedipus gouges out his eyes, screaming, "You, you'll see no more the pain I suffered, all the pain I caused! Too long you looked on the ones you never should have seen, blind to the ones you longed to see, to know! Blind from this hour on! Blind in the darkness-blind!"
The catharsis in this play builds itself up around this event as Oedipus can no longer see, physically, but then becomes overwhelmed by the memories of his actions and he now understands, but can do nothing about it: "Dark, dark! The horror of darkness, like a shroud, Wraps me and bears me on through mist and cloud. Ah me, ah me! What spasms athwart me shoot, What pangs of agonizing memory?" Although as the audience, it is understood that his predicament was self-inflicted. He didn't listen to the prophecies laid out for him, and he is the one who took brash action to blind himself. It was his own fault that he was blind and wracked with guilt. The balance between ownership and acceptance of responsibility for what happened with a human compassion and pity for the circumstances he now found himself, without any actionable course of self-correction, plays on the audience as it becomes difficult not to experience an empathetic response to his words of equal parts anguish, but also acknowledgment.
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