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Comparing Nora And Oedipus The King

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Nora and Oedipus both hold qualities of Tragic Heroes. Both characters experience Hamartia leading them to Peripeteia and Anagnorisis. In Oedipus, Oedipus curses the man who killed the King to “drag out / his life in agony, step by painful step” and himself if the man was “an intimate of [his] house” (Sophocles, 1434). Because he was the one who killed the King, he cursed himself twice which shows a miss of judgment because he thought it was someone else, but it was not. Nora, from A Doll House, experiences Hamartia when she thought Trovald would be mad to find out she forged her signature to get money to care for him and keep him alive. She pays money behind his back because of how “painful and humiliating” she thinks it will be for him because he “has such strong opinions about [those] things” (Ibsen, 1721). …show more content…

At this point he realizes he recognizes the man as someone he killed years before, but when Jocasta says there “were finve in the party, a herald among them, / and a single wagon carrying Laius” (Sophocles, 1447) he turns away from the idea of it being him and continues to search for his own past leading him deeper and deeper into a hole. Nora’s reversal of fortune happens when Krogstad comes to confront her about helping him keep his job at the bank. Before he showed up she hid her secret perfectly well and gave him all the payments, but when Krogstad was faced with losing his job, he went to see Nora so she could “use [her] influence to prevent it” (Ibsen, 1727). She tells him she has “absolutely no influence” (Ibsen, 1727), so he pulls out the blackmail of telling the town of her

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