Oedipus Rex Vs. The Burial Term Paper

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His nephew turned against his own country and he got what he deserved. but, in king Creon's view, death is not enough. He believes in setting an example and uses the occasion as an opportunity to make a point and warn all those who dared to defy their country of the fate that was expecting them, too. In this case, King Creon is wrong, because he will eventually pay dearly for his mistake of defying the gods. Profanation represented a duty of the humans to the higher forces and not even a king could afford to forget that.

The Burial at Thebes is a play meant to bring the work of a classic Greek play writer into the twenty-first century. Freud found the sources of one of his psychoanalytic theories in Oedipus Rex, paying his tribute to his predecessor who lived two and a half centuries away.

The audiences in the classical period of Greece and Ireland, 2004 were not only separated by more than two and a half millennia, but also by new concepts. War began to have new meanings. Sophocles contemporaries were more than familiar to war because the world, as they new it, was too small for all of them to make a living. They were constantly pushed to find new territories and new means of supporting their existence. The modern world does not have to conquer new territories in order to support itself, but it has to deal with genocide, mass murder, suicide bombs etc. The common denominator between the our world and that in the play the Burial at Thebes is the power to choose not go along with tyranny.

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The moment Creon decrees that anyone who gives a proper burial to his nephew is a traitor, he oversteps his duty as a leader of his country and falls onto the side of tyranny. Antigone is the element that will shatter his world. Going against his command, she takes her destiny into her own hands. She sacrifices herself because she finds it the only way for her to keep her humanity: "Given away to death!

Remember this, citizens. / I am linked on Hades' arm, / Taking my last look, / My last walk in the light. / Soon the sun will go out / on a silent, starless shore / and Hades will step aside. / He will give me to Acheron, / Lord of the pitch-black lake, / and that bridegroom's cold hand / Will take my hand in the dark" (Heaney).

Oedipus Rex and the Burial at Thebes are presenting two very different audiences with two different ways of ruling over a country. Each of them appeals to its own audience because they are dealing with the human conscious and subconscious as it influenced people's actions since the first human being walked on earth.

Heaney, Seamus. The Burial at Thebes. A Version of Sophocle's Antigone. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition….....

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