The duplicities of the Oedipus the King by Sophocles

Abstract

The main scholars that analyzed Sophocles' play, Oedipus the King (S. OT), in which Oedipus figures as the supreme ruler of Thebes, suggest that the determining feature of this character would be a kind of fundamental ambivalence or duplicity. In this sense, Oedipus would be actually not only one, but two. Assuming this characterization as typical of the tragic discourse (as Jean-Pierre Vernant suggests), we intend to demonstrate that an aggravation of something of that order undermines the unicity of this mythos, as well as its characters and their speeches, since even its protagonist is split in two different figures (who are in a certain way antagonistic). The objective of the present paper is to pay attention to the complexity of its plotting -- in its different stratagems to proportionate space-time displacements, tense situations, expressions of dubious content and of undecidable value -- with which the crescendo in the tragic significance of the drama is developed, up to its dissolution in the scene where a more profound truth is revealed in a blinding and violent splendor. The conflict between the duplicity of human reality and the univocity of divine speech reaches a paroxysm that was recognized as such even in Antiquity and that is responsible for making this piece, in the opinion of many people, Sophocles' masterpiece, perhaps the masterpiece of all classical Greek tragedies.