To
emphasize the theme of fate in his tragic play ,uses what modern audiences
will recognize from television shows and movies as a flashback technique to
bring the audience up-to-date on historical information that's relevant to the play.
tells the story of how the Oracle had prophesied to her former husband, Laius, the
former King of Thebes, that their son would one day kill Laius, his own father. Jocasta recounts
how she and Laius had their three-day-old son "cast away/By others on the trackless
mountain side" and left to die there to avoid their son fulfilling the prophecy so that
Laius could escape his fate.
The opposite of flashbacks is
, which Sophocles uses to give the audience hints about what's going to
happen later in the play.foreshadows his own fate when he tells the people of Thebes the fate
that will befall the murderer of Laius:
OEDIPUS: Hear what
I then resolve; I lay my ban
On the assassin whosoe'er he be.
Let no man in
this land, whereof I hold
The sovereign rule, harbor or speak to him...
And on
the murderer this curse I lay
(On him and all the partners in his
guilt):
Wretch, may he pine in utter wretchedness!
And for myself, if with my
privity
He gain admittance to my hearth, I pray
The curse I laid on others
fall on me.
Sophocles also uses dramatic
to emphasize the theme of the inevitability of fate and the inviolability of the
will of the gods. The dramatic irony in Oedipus Rex is that the audience
knows something important to the play that thein the play do not know.
, the
blind seer-prophet, acts as the eyes of the audience. Teiresias is the only character who
"sees" what other charactersparticularly Oedipus, and his wife-mother, Jocastacannot
see or refuse to see. Teiresias knows, as does the audience, that Oedipus has in fact fulfilled
the prophecy and his inevitable and unavoidable fate by killing his own father and marrying his
own mother.
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