One of the lasting debates about Sophocles’ Antigone focuses on whether the main tragic figure in the play is Antigone or Creon. Antigone is a more sympathetic character than Creon, and she also exhibits some of the characteristics of a tragic figure—through her own pride and actions, she suffers a reversal of fortune. Further, she is the daughter of Oedipus, and the other two of Sophocles’ Theban plays focus on Oedipus and his family. This may indicate that she is the main focus of this play as it follows the theme of the tragedy of the family of Oedipus. It is also worth noting that the title Antigone was ascribed to the play be readers who found Antigone to be the main focus of the play (we do not know what title, if any, was given to the play by Sophocles).
What creates uncertainty regarding who should be considered the main tragic figure in the play is that Creon also exhibits the characteristics of a tragic figure, and some even read Creon as being the more prominent tragic figure. His fall, within the context of the play itself, is greater and more complete than Antigone’s fall, in the sense that he has to live with the deaths of his loved ones, which his actions wrought. Further, Creon comes to recognize his own fall, and the reasons for it, in a way that Antigone, who goes to death defiant and proud, does not. In this way, Creon seems to be a more likely candidate for the main tragic figure.
However, perhaps a more complete understanding of the play is that both Antigone and Creon are tragic figures, and that neither character's role in the play is more prominent than the other character's role, at least in terms of who the main tragic figure is. So while modern readers will likely see Antigone as the main character, as she is more sympathetic and seems to fit the mold of a protagonist, and the less sympathetic Creon as the antagonist, it seems quite possible that Sophocles intended a more complex understanding of the roles of the two main characters in the play Antigone.
Monday, August 8, 2016
Why is Creon not the main character in Antigone?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Summarize the major research findings of "Toward an experimental ecology of human development."
Based on findings of prior research, the author, Bronfenbrenner proposes that methods for natural observation research have been applied in ...
-
One way to support this thesis is to explain how these great men changed the world. Indeed, Alexander the Great (356–323 BC) was the quintes...
-
Polysyndeton refers to using several conjunctions in a row to achieve a dramatic effect. That can be seen in this sentence about the child: ...
-
Both boys are very charismatic and use their charisma to persuade others to follow them. The key difference of course is that Ralph uses his...
-
At the most basic level, thunderstorms and blizzards are specific weather phenomena that occur most frequently within particular seasonal cl...
-
Equation of a tangent line to the graph of function f at point (x_0,y_0) is given by y=y_0+f'(x_0)(x-x_0). The first step to finding eq...
-
Population policy is any kind of government policy that is designed to somehow regulate or control the rate of population growth. It include...
-
Gulliver cooperates with the Lilliputians because he is so interested in them. He could, obviously, squash them underfoot, but he seems to b...
No comments:
Post a Comment