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Antigone And Creon Analysis

Decent Essays

The dramatic play Antigone that Sophocles had formulated, carries out a complex and increasingly suspenseful plot. Creon, the king of Thebes, establishes a law that deprives Polynices, one of the two brothers that had died fighting for his rightful seat on the throne, a proper burial due to the attack of his own city. In response, Polynices’ sister Antigone defies this law behind Creon’s back and is as a consequence, sentenced to death. Yet, Creon’s judgements ultimately lead to his downfall as he loses all things significant to him in life. Thus, the characters of Antigone and Creon within Sophocles’ play find themselves in a conflict between their own conceivement of the law, which mirror the conflict between the divine and state. What Sophocles’ intends to convey within the tragic conclusion of both characters is the individuality of law and the correlating misconception that a wrong or right can be established within its definition.
In constructing the mindsets of Creon and Antigone, whose complexity becomes a backbone to the intricacy of the play as a whole, Sophocles utilizes both their actions and the dialogue of the “mediators” to reveal the treatment and perception of their own preconceived laws. According to Sam Meisner from the fishbowl discussion, Antigone’s sister and Creon’s son Haemon acted as the “voices of reason” within the plot as both worked to reveal the hidden faults of the favored laws, thus dubbing them the “mediators” between the two extremes of the

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