Identity In Comedy Of Errors And The Brothers

The Greek play, Oedipus the King, shows how easy it is for a man to fall apart, while trying to make things right. Sophocles’ tragedy tells the story of Oedipus, a regular man turned king of Thebes. Throughout the tragedy, Oedipus searches for the cause of the chaos and havoc encompassing his land; however, he discovers that he is the one responsible for the hardships plaguing Thebes. As the tragedy continues, Sophocles’ exposes a dark side to power, fame, and ambition. Further, Sophocles’ exposes the fear that many have of the truth, and exposes the grave danger in hiding from it.

“In the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity” (Erik Erikson). In literature, identity is used to establish who a character is and what they believe in. In historical fiction, identity functions as a device utilized to give a character more depth and give the reader more of an idea of what the character stands for and the decisions they might make. In Night, despite being a very devout man, after having his faith taken away from him, Elie Wiesel loses his individual identity proving that, when man loses his most important belief, he loses himself and becomes “a corpse” (Wiesel 115).

People have different identities because they all make their own over the course of their lives. Identity development is the outcome of different experiences and situations people encounter throughout their lives. Views, beliefs, activities, and conflicts have an impact on how individuals form their identities. People go through life trying to recognize their character traits, the act of which leads them to their identities, but over time can lose the identities they have through society, through a marriage, or through one’s own self. Willy Loman, a delusional salesman, in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman; Minnie Wright, an unhappy and lonely housewife, in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles; and Oedipus, a king with excessive pride and

F. Scott Fitzgerald created a novel, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which explores how identity can be uttered by the age of a person. Benjamin Button shows how confusion towards his own identity can be dictated by a unique way of aging backwards and becoming younger as time exceeds. One’s identity and how he or she stereotypically acts primarily depends on that person’s age. Due to his unusual aging condition, Benjamin struggles with his identity throughout his life. For example, he is able to create mature conversations at a young age of eighteen at the dance with Hildegarde and play as a five-year-old without any care in the world when he is chronologically much older. He must learn to cope with this way of aging and understand how others may view him in social settings. Benjamin faces many difficult situations in which he

“‘Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of action and life, of happiness and misery’” (Milch 12). This statement by Aristotle reflects the ideas portrayed in the play Oedipus Rex. Written by Sophocles, Oedipus Rex is a play which combines tragedy with irony to tell a story of a noble king who falls short of his greatness. The play was written around 430 BC and originally intended for an Athenian audience. They considered Sophocles their most successful playwright and consequently, his works continued to be valued highly throughout the Greek world long after his death. A closer examination of this play is needed to see just why it has been regarded as Sophocles’ masterpiece and the greatest of all Greek tragedies (Milch 16, 36).

In Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, identity is connected to one’s social standing. The characters behaviour and personalities are ways for the characters to not face their actual selves. Jonson gives the characters “double identities” to fool the others and those “double identities” prevent the characters from improving and changing their internal selves (behaviours and personalities). In The Alchemist, fantasies can lead to the loss of personal identities and will cause trouble that will come with consequences.

The mother, Amelia, and Antipholus ended up in Ephesus while the father, Aegeon and Antipholus’ twin also named Antipholus ended in Syracuse. I thought The Comedy of Errors was kind of confusing at first but once it wasn’t as confusing it, I realized they were both named Antipholus and thought it was funny. The Comedy of Errors was written by William Shakespeare for fans of comedy but in modern times people who like Shakespeare’s other stories. The Comedy of Errors took place in the past in the Greek Cities of Ephesus. The Comedy of Errors is in the third person point of view. The conflict in The Comedy of Errors is Aegon’s family being separated but there is a ban on travel between the cities they live in and the penalty is death. The theme of The Comedy of Errors is family and identity. William Shakespeare wrote The Comedy of Errors mainly for entertainment purposes. William Shakespeare keeps the reader entertained with humor and irony. I would recommend The Comedy of Errors to fans of other Shakespeare

The play King Oidipous by Sophocles is essentially timeless, bearing repeated readings over thousands of years. Throughout those years, many discussions about the flaws of humanity and the nature of fate have centered around the tragedy. When discussing the role of fate in a person’s life and the role of a person’s choices in fate, King Oidipous must be split into two separate parts, the past and the present, the cause and the effect. The work essentially has two plots. The first takes place in the past, in which Oidipous kills his father and marries his mother without knowing who they really are, also saving the city of Thebes and becoming king. The second helps Oidipous realize the veracity of these events and focuses

It is important to know your true-identity. It’s important to know your true identity because Identity is the most important power that determines our actions. If you never truly know who you are then your actions will or most likely be based on who you think you are. When you think that you're never going to know who you are it is possible to go into a depression. Not knowing your true-identity can even get you in trouble, like if you are hanging out with different types of friends because you don’t know witch ones are better you could possibly get in trouble if you had a bad group of friends. The characters April and Hercules both had struggles while on their way to find their true-identity, in April’s story she was following the crowd staying behind her mask, and in Hercules’ story he

William Shakespeare wrote many plays, including Romeo and Juliet. The real title of the play is The Extraordinary and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet takes place Verona in the mid-1300’s. The idea of identity heavily impacts the story of Romeo and Juliet. By the end of the play, family affiliation, gender, social class, and age all contribute to the tragedy of the play. Today’s idea of identity is drastically different than the 1300’s, but at the same time, they are very much the same.

In the play Oedipus Rex, we can distinguish Sophocles use of events to construct and the irony of the ideal family relationship. As a result of the fate of Oedipus, he had a dis-functional family. However despite his flawed relationship, the family was able to fulfill the prophecy unintentionally by killing Oedipus.

In this play, Oedipus decides to pursue the knowledge of his identity. However, fate determines Oedipus’s incest and other critical events in the play. Sophocles highlights the importance of fate to express to the audience that the characters cannot be responsible for their actions. Antigone

With all the questions in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors in mind, I feel the most consistently asked is how resilient are family bonds? This question is asked on many occasions throughout the play and ties into the MOWW, which is family always comes first. The closing scene where Egeon says “Not know my voice? O time's extremity, Hast thou so crack'd and splitted my poor tongue in seven short years that here my only son Knows not my feeble key of untuned cares? Though now this grainèd face of mine be hid in sap-consuming winter's drizzled snow…tell me thou art my son Antipholus.” By doing this Egeon shows how much Antipholus and his family mean to him.

In this modern day world people may continuously confuse similarly used words, and often think they mean the same thing. However, in reality they don’t. Nonetheless, the main focus words are identity, and self. Identity to me is similar to social scientist phrase “presentation of self”, and what that means is how a person wants to present themselves to others. Similar to actors, and singers that are constructively criticized by their image, so they can better it to wow their fans. In contrast to self which is being true to who you are. As seen in When the Emperor was Divine the family struggle with knowing their self, and identity. The family begins as middle upper class materialistic people in California that are nameless with a sense of family unity, and self worth. Eventually transforming to isolated, exhausted, loss souls having to wear ID numbers on their collar (p. 24). Starting off with the father which is a very symbolic character since he is only spoken about in memories, and letters. Even so far away his family describes him as loving, caring, and warm hearted. The children would say “Our father, the father we remembered, and had dreamed of, almost nightly, all through the years of the war, was handsome and strong. He moved quickly, surely, with his head held high in the air. He liked to draw for us. He liked to sing for us. He liked to laugh” (p. 132). All to show that to them he was everything you’d want in a father, but after war he turned into a ghost “Because

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies takes place during a war, and follows a group of unsupervised British school boys who crash land on an island due to the war. Jack is able to hide his true self behind a mask which allows him to act out on his savage tendencies; however, Piggy never hides his true self causing the other boys to see Piggy as someone who should not be taken seriously. Through the humiliations suffered by Jack and Piggy, Golding shows that when the boys conceal their identity, they act without repercussions which proves that mankind has a weak state of mind.