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Free Oedipus The King Essays: Character Analysis

758 Words4 Pages

Casey Blue
Mr. Kleinman
AP Eng Lit. Per. 6
2 September 2014
Oedipus Essay Due in large part to his own uncontrollable fate, but also in part to his own hubris, Oedipus, King of Thebes, physically loses his eyesight but metaphorically gains it. At the beginning of Sophocles' play. Oedipus the King, Oedipus still has his eyesight, but is blind to his role as a murder and to having committed incest. Just as Oedipus is blind to his transgressions, Amanda, in The Glass Menagerie, is blind to reality. She looks both back to the past and forward to the future, but forgets to glance at her current life, which ultimately separates her from her children. Teiresias, a blind prophet (ever ironic), tells Oedipus of his fate and receives in return insults and accusations. In this exchange, a paranoid Oedipus accuses him of conspiring with Creon, failing to grasp the truth and magnitude of the prophets words. Oedipus' blindness to the truth is blatant as he makes a fearful and impractical hypothesis that, "Creon [his] old trusted family friend, has secretly conspired to overthrow [him], and paid off... a bogus priest, who can only see his own advantage, …show more content…

She clings to her past, telling stories irrelevant to her current standings in life, retelling stories such as a "Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain when [she]... received- seventeen-gentelman callers"(13). Being that Amanda is a single mother with two children, her story of many gentleman callers is her living in her past glory, which handicaps her present life. She hopes for her daughter, Laura, to also be an object of a man's desire and love, to have many gentleman callers just as she did, but Laura is slightly disabled and terribly shy. Her attempt to garner a mate for Laura is a painful attempt to live through her daughter's life, and the entire scheme fails miserably leaving Amanda and Laura more hopeless than

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