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How Did Oedipus Fall From Grace

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The poet Arthur Rimbaud once said, “By being too sensitive, I have wasted my life,” and yet his poetry, rife with both ecstasy and melancholy, have come to be some of the most remarkable of the Romantic movement and literature as a whole. In Oedipus Rex, there is a similar beauty in the juxtaposition of both “pleasure and disquietude” resulting from Oedipus’s fall from grace and the dramatic irony therein, and his own subsequent realization of it, which provides catharsis. Oedipus’s fall from grace is already largely known at the beginning of the play by its audience, as it was a key Greek myth and even later came to be immortalized in the Freudian Oedipus complex, and it serves to give both a sense of pleasure and anxiety to the audience. For example, Oedipus’s almost godly presence in Thebes at the beginning of the play, as shown through the people’s offerings and prayer-like pleads gives an initial sense of pleasure due to his wisdom and paternal care toward them, as contrasted with Creon, who does not …show more content…

Yet the audience’s prior knowledge of Oedipus’s eventual fall from grace eventually pollutes this feeling and transforms it into a terrible anxiety instead; Oedipus’s sympathetic trait of concern for his people is disfigured into a fatal flaw of bullheaded impulsivity, for

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