We use cookies to give you the best experience possible. The dramatic irony has not much in common with the irony we are used to: it is not funny or is, but in extremely bitter way. It is the situation, when the audience already knows the answer to the question the characters try to solve.
They understand that everything is going to end on a grim note, but the characters are still struggling, not knowing that their efforts are worthless. William Shakespeare was a great master of the dramatic irony , but the oldest and one of the most wonderful works that uses it belongs to the playwright of Ancient Greece, Sophocles.
Order My Unique Sample. The oracle proclaims that the baby, who will be born by the queen will kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified by the prophecy, the Kind orders to take newborn Oedipus and leave him far away in the mountains for the mercy of the gods. Luckily, the shepherd, who was chosen to complete the grim task, meets his colleague from another kingdom. But when the shepherd returns home, he decides to show the baby to his own King and Queen. The Queen, who desperately wants to have a son, decides to adopt the baby and raise him as her own and a prince.
Young Oedipus grows up a strong and handsome man, but then, when he comes to the oracle to ask about his fate, he receives the same prophecy: he will kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified and disgusted, Oedipus leaves his kingdom, deciding to stay away from his parents.
Not knowing that he is adopted, he swears not to return home to avoid killing and disgracing his beloved family. He flees from the prophecy, but we, as the audience, already understand that he runs straight to his fate. On his way to the palace Oedipus encounters an old nobleman riding somewhere.
The guards of the man rudely demanded Oedipus to step back and the young man refused. A fight started and the prince managed to kill almost everyone including the nobleman himself. Unwillingly, Oedipus kills his father. When Oedipus comes to the palace, he learns that King Laius disappeared and Queen Jocasta is now considered a widow. By doing this, the shepherd does not know he is actually helping the prophecy to come true.
In addition, Oedipus grows up and is also given the same prophecy, so he flees from Corinth to find somewhere else to live. By doing this, Oedipus also helps the prophecy to come to past. Along the way to find his new home, Oedipus kills an old man in self-defense, who is later discovered to be Laius his father. Not only has the prophecy come true, but Oedipus has played a huge part in helping it come to past. He finds that running from the prophecy has caused him to actually run into the life which the prophet has warned him about rather than saving him from the life which he despises and thinks he has escaped.
The dramatic irony behind these events is, although Oedipus thinks he has defeated the prophecy, the prophecy is being fulfilled throughout the story without the knowledge of the main characters. Oedipus still has hope that the story of the king being killed by several robbers is true and not by one single man at the very same crossroads. The truth is revealed to both Oedipus and his mother Jocasta that the prophecy has been fulfilled when Oedipus killed his father at the crossroads and took his mothers hand as the new king of Thebes.
Oedipus has fallen and has killed his father and married his mother and the prophecy has come. Even thought his destiny was in fact to kill his own father, the unique reason the crime of patricide was committed was in self-defense. Laios, Oedipus' biological father, considered a wandered on a foreign road by Oedipus, insulted and assaulted his poor son, and other negative events transpired, which resulted in his own death.
When someone commit murder by self-defense, it is Oedipus blinding himself at the end of play proves his innocence and that he is misfortunate to be the man who was able to solve the Sphinx's riddle and the man who became Jocasta's husband committing incest by doing so.
Oedipus committing the crime against his own father -not knowing it was his biological father- could not be avoided, his ignorance in a certain way absolves him of all blame. This shows that Christopher's father was lying to him about his mother being dead and he had told a giant lie and was deceitful to Christopher that made him go through that pain as if he had lost his mother. The next quote happens right after father had confessed he had killed Wellington which filled Christopher with rage and fear from his father's wrong actions.
Christopher states while writing in his book,"I had to get out of the house. Father had murdered Wellington. That means he could murder me, because I couldn't trust him even though he had said trust me because he had told a lie about a big thing. Should he be held accountable for killing his father and marrying his mother? To me Oedipus is a man of great personal folly. He may have been fated to commit the crimes but he also allowed them to happen though his actions.
I believe that he is at least partly guilty of the aforementioned crimes. Even though they all died at the end, each character died for a different reason and a different purpose. In the eyes of some people Othello and Macbeth can be seen as the bad guys.
Othello kills the woman he loves based on some evidence he is show by others, yet he never talks to Desdemona about the evidence. Macbeth murders his king to rise to power, however his evil side seems to be more of a dissolution. In the story, Strout, the man who is shot, is clearly guilty but he is also a human being and that knowledge was suppressed by Fowler to kill him. At the end of the story Matt committed a kind of self murder by killing Strout.
He is the judge, jury and the executioner which invites the readers to feel the anger and righteousness of the character. Oedipus on the other hand is a complete douche, figuratively speaking. He is simply a king trying to help his people.
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