Lit/Film
Oedipus the King Essay
According
to Aristotle, readers/viewers of the play should feel terror – not the terror
of confronting the fallen blind king, Oedipus, but rather the terror of facing
the proud, blind person within each of us.
Come on, look deep within; you’ll see that person staring back.
Instead of a literary analysis of
the play, let’s try something a little different. Choose a passage – an exchange of dialogue
from the text, perhaps – as a spring-board to write about a time in your life
when you faced a similar philosophical crisis to that of Oedipus. (Hopefully you won’t have killed your father
or married your mother). Rather, think
about a time you pressed on and discovered unsettling information; write about
a time you discovered who you were; write about a time you felt influenced by
the advice/suggestion (read: prophecy)
of another person; write about a time you went public with information that
should have stayed private (You’d need to divulge the information again in your
paper, or your readers would be up in arms); write about a time you refused to
see something that now seems obvious, even when you were given ample evidence
to see the truth from the beginning. Or,
find some other resemblance between you and Oedipus. With college deadlines and graduation less
than a year away, surely you’ve recently thought to yourself, “I am agony”
(239, line 1443).
Your essay should be 2-3 pages in
length. Start with the quote/exchange
from the play, and use it as your epigraph.
Then write a fully developed story about the event in your life. End with a commentary on how the story
relates (is similar to and is different from Oedipus’s predicament). A draft will
be due on Tuesday September 25th.
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