Oedipus Tragic Hero Essay

The tragic hero is a character whose tribulation comes unwanted, but also by some error in judgment. This judgment error leads to characters own downfall. Aristotle has said that “A man doesn’t become a hero until he can see the root of his own destruction” (Carli 2015). Most of histories early plays were written as either a tragedy or comedy. In tragic plays, the unlikely hero will do something that will kill the character. Oedipus, the main character of the play, is a king with ideal tragic hero traits in his personality, but his downfall is due to flaws in his moral decisions. That makes the reader have the tragic hero feeling at the end of the play when all the good of Oedipus is muddled in his fight against his evilness. Oedipus’ parents had to throw him away the day he was born, because it was foretold that he would kill his father and marry his mother. He was pitied by the shepherd who was supposed to leave him in the mountains of Cithaeron. Instead of dying, and “out of pity for the baby” the shepherd gave him to the shepherd of King Polybus (Sophocles).
Oedipus' nobility provided his first key to becoming a tragic hero.

His story tells us that man can do his best, but even then, he cannot overcome the inevitable fate. Oedipus eventually sees the truth of his life, so Sophocles hammers home his point by having the king stab out his own eyes. Oedipus says he does this because he can no longer look at the evil that his actions have created. “crying out that they should never see him again, nor what he suffered nor the evil he did, nor look on those they should not— but only darkness, forever” (1271-74). Oedipus literally becomes the thing he's always been: blind. Therefore, he is an example of a tragic hero because he gouged out his eyes; which later came back to destroy him. At the end of the play, Oedipus becomes a symbol for all of humanity; in that he is going forward blind into the