2. Motifs recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes element that has symbolic significance which is repeated as a means of producing a theme or mood
3. Motifs versus Themes MOTIFS THEMES images, spoken or written phrases, structural or stylistic devices, or other elements like sound, physical movement, or visual components a detail repeated for larger symbolic meaning, whatever that meaning may be message, statement, idea motifs can be indirect ways to express the gist or overall message of the story which is also called as the theme
4. Suicide In Sophocles' three Theban plays, namely Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone, incest motivates or indirectly brings about all of the deaths in these plays.
5. Jocasta Jocasta hung herself in Oedipus the King when she found out the she married and had four children with her own son.
6. Oedipus Oedipus inflicts horrible violence on himself at the end of Oedipus the King, and willingly goes to his own mysterious death at the end of Oedipus at Colonus. He inflicted it upon himself upon knowing that it is he who killed his own father and wed his own mother
7. Sight and Blindness the image of clear vision is used as a metaphor for knowledge and insight very common in Greek lifestyle which was inherited by the English language humans can demonstrate powers of foresight and great intellect but the plays show that even the smartest human is liable to error
8. Oedipus famed for quick comprehension and clear-sightedness [evident when he solved the riddle of the Sphinx] blind to the truth for many years and eventually blinds himself so as for him not to see his own children though blind, aging Oedipus acquired limited prophetic vision.
9. Jocasta Jocasta was also blind to the truth that she married and had children with her own son, who killed his first husband, King Laius. At the end of the play, she resorted to suicide as the only solution to the mistakes she have made.
10. Teiresias/Tiresias/Teirisias "So, you mock my blindness? Let me tell you this. You [Oedipus] with your precious eyes, you're blind to the corruption of your life...“(Oedipus the king, 469) blind seer that can “see” better than most characters [Oedipus] warned Oedipus not to seek Laius' killer but was provoked into exposing Oedipus himself as the killer
11. Graves and Tombs traitors and people who murder their own relatives could not be buried within their city’s territory, but relatives still had an obligation to bury them burials represent the obligations that come from kinship, also the conflicts that arise between one’s duty to family and to the city-state
12. Oedipus Oedipus cannot remain in Thebes or be buried within its territory, because of the wrongdoings he has done his choice to be buried at Colonus confers a great and mystical gift on all of Athens, promising that nation victory over future attacker
When Antigone refuses to obey the order of Creon to not bury her brother’s body, she makes what is in our world a political protest against what she considers an unjust and immoral law. Her refusal to obey Creon's edict to leave her brother's body to be consumed by wild animals leads to her capture and to her death. Although Creon decides to execute Antigone, he later agrees to set her free because the “mob” wants her to live. She could then, escape death. By taking her own life (she hangs herself), she again refuses to submit to Creon demands. Although she ends her life, she does so on her own terms, not on his.
Children: antigone,polyneices, ismene, eteocles
I see the truth; I see the way things arehuman beings can demonstrate remarkable powers of intellectual penetration and insight, and that they have a great capacity for knowledge, but that even the smartest human being is liable to error, that the human capability for knowledge is ultimately quite limited and unreliable
It is deliberately ironic that the "seer" can "see" better than Oedipus, despite being blind.
because his very person is polluted and offensive to the sight of gods and men.