Resumo de Oedipus Rex

Sophocles? Oedipus Rex opens with signs of plague and the people crying out for help from their ruler, Oedipus. Oedipus agrees to find the solution and calls for the oracle to come again and tell them what needs to be done to solve the problem. The pestilence, however, soon appears to be caused by Oedipus himself. Something unnatural has occurred and it is the fault of the imbalance of nature caused by Oedipus? marriage to his own mother.
Oedipus does not believe the prophesy and complains that it is a plot caused by his brother-in-law, Creon to seize the thrown. The more facts are produced the more tyrannical Oedipus becomes. However, soon he discovers without a doubt that he is himself the cause of the horrible plague and his actions, though unintended, have been both base and unnatural. Laius, Oedipus? actual father, had heard a prophesy that predicted him being killed by his son and tried to have Oedipus killed by leaving him with feet pinned together, to die in the desert. However, a shepherd freed him and took him off to Corinth where he was raised by the king and queen as their son. When he was young he heard that it was his fate to marry his mother and kill his father, so he ran away from his supposed parents in Corinth and sought his fortune elsewhere. However, unfortunately for him, he ran into his actual father Laius on the road and they had a disagreement about the right of way. In a fight, Oedipus killed Laius and continued on to Thebes where he found the dreaded Sphinx and solved the riddle to free the land and give him Jocasta, his actual mother, in marriage.
When Jocasta, before Oedipus, hears the dreaded knews, she instantly kills herself. Oedipus when he finds out how blind he has been, blinds himself and agrees to be banished from his home, his daughter Antigone, leads him off into the desert. The play describes not man?s guilt but his attempt to out win fate. The more the man, Oedipus attempts to out run his fate the faster he hurdles into it, thus the Greeks were emphasizing the inevitability of man?s suffering and no matter how much he struggles against divine will, the Gods are greater than man. However, this does not exclude free will, the play is itself a display of how human beings create their end as well as the gods. Oedipus? actions and his characteristic fatal flaw creates his destiny as much as the Oracle of Apollo predicts it.
In Oedipus Rex, the chorus displays the typical function of the chorus in Greek Tragedy. They are the ideal spectators of the action and act as both witnesses and commentators as the tragedy unfolds. They present the every day attitudes of the time and are representations of conventional reactions to extraordinary events. The chorus is the voice of the audience, offering the function of voicing the shock, dismay, and pity for the heroes and heroines felt by the audience during the course of the play. The tragedians often use the chorus, who are on stage the entire time, to present odes and sing songs, to give exposition of important events which occurred before the start of the play, and to offer transitions between scenes.
Oedipus Rex describes the perfect Greek hero of both action and intellect, in fact the hero of reason, Oedipus, the man who solved the famous riddle of the sphinx, and it follows this great character from the height of fame to the depths of abject misery. Oedipus is the most envious of men and soon he becomes the most shunned and pitied for his fate.

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