Wings of Desire and Antigone: Conflicts and Opposites Essay

Sophocles’ play Antigone continues the calamitous story of the Theban royal family, recounting the conflict between Creon’s authority as king and Antigone’s sense of justice. While many of the events of the play are certainly tragic, whether or not Antigone and its characters should be considered tragic is less definite. Aristotle’s theory of a tragic hero calls for a basically good character who experiences a fall due to some flaw or error, experiencing a transformative realization and catharsis as a result. When considered together, the traits of both Antigone and Creon come together to fulfill all of the requirements for the play to be a tragedy, but neither character can be considered an Aristotelian tragic hero standing alone.

Full of drama and tragedy, Antigone can be used to relate to current conflicts. One such conflict is that between Haemon and his father Creon. Haemon looks up to Creon with honor and pride, but as conflict arises, that relation is disassociated and new feelings grow. The first conversation between them is what initiates the downfall of their bond. While it seems that Creon is the most important person in Haemon’s life, Antigone is in fact the one that has won Haemon over.

In the Greek play Antigone writer Sophocles illustrates the clash between the story’s main character Antigone and her powerful uncle, Creon. King Creon of Thebes is an ignorant and oppressive ruler. In the text, there is a prevailing theme of rules and order in which Antigone’s standards of divine justice conflict with Creon’s will as the king. Antigone was not wrong in disobeying Creon, because he was evil and tyrannical. The authors of “Antigone: Kinship, Justice, and the Polis,” and “Assumptions and the Creation of Meaning: Reading Sophocles’ Antigone.” agree with the notion that Antigone performs the role of woman and warrior at once. She does not only what a kinswoman would, but also what a warrior would do.

Even though Antigone exhibits a blamable pride and a hunger for glory, her disobedience is less serious than those of Creon. It is evident that Antigone’s actions are driven by a love for her brother, and a desire to please the gods. While Creon’s actions are

   In the Antigone, unlike the Oedipus Tyrannus, paradoxically, the hero who is left in agony at the end of the play is not the title role. Instead King Creon, the newly appointed and tyrannical ruler, is left all alone in his empty palace with his wife's corpse in his hands, having just seen the suicide of his son. However, despite this pitiable fate for the character, his actions and behavior earlier in the play leave the final scene evoking more satisfaction than pity at his torment. The way the martyr Antigone went against the King and the city of Thebes was not entirely honorable or without ulterior motives of fulfilling pious concerns but it is difficult to lose sight of the fact

Whether we agree with this play's message, or follow it, it's theme lies in Antigone's triumph against mundane opposition. It definitely showed support for her conviction, and the reader should be able to accept or reject this view. Whether one gives one's life for a cause depends on how deeply our moral standards are imbedded in one's heart, and on our acknowledgment of the importance of a

Antigone is a play about a woman who disobeyed the King's order to not bury her brother. The play was written by the famous Greek tragedian, Sophocles, in 441 B.C. The story took place in the city of Thebes and the time period is not mentioned. The main characters introduced in the play are of Antigone, Ismene, Creon, and Haemon. The primary focus was centered on Antigone and the consequences she faces after breaking the King's orders.

Antigone is a play written by the tragedian Sophocles in around 441 BC. It is about a woman (Antigone) who defies a law set by her uncle, the king (Creon), that Antigone’s brother shall not be buried. This eventually leads to the suicide of Antigone, her husband, and Creon's wife. The play has a lot to say about loyalties and where or to whom they should lie. We see people struggle with their loyalties all throughout the play and we learn what the characters have to say about them. Through the tragedy of Antigone, Sophocles is telling us that your loyalties should lie first with the gods and family even if it means losing your life, and second with the state.

Sophocles' Antigone is, at its simplest, a tragedy of conflict and misunderstandings. In the play, the laws of the gods are set up against the laws of man, and the two appear irreconcilable as the values are upheld by equally opposing characters, Creon and Antigone respectively. Indeed, Wilkins and Macleod decide that in Antigone `not only is there conflict, there is also a refusal even to recognise the other's point of view' (23). Thus Chorus significantly warn against the pursuit of extremes and sing about the need for men to reconcile human and divine law:

The central conflict in Antigone poses a moral question. Does Creon have the authority to forbid Antigone to follow the will of the gods? To Antigone, the will of the gods is more important than following the law of the state. To Creon, maintaining stability in Thebes outweighs the wishes of a young woman. Both parties have valid reasons for their choices. However, not enough information is at hand. More research must be done; the only way to accurately determine the answer to the question posed is to determine the social context in which the play takes place. Several aspects of Ancient Greek culture must

The play Antigone was written by Sophocles in 441 B.C. during the festival of Dionysus, god of Wine and Fertility. The Greek tragedies were plays where every character eventually dies for their actions one way or another. The writers of the time wrote plays on serious topics to teach people of their society how to respond and behave on such problem. In the play Antigone we read a major conflict between the question should we owe more to the government or to our families? The numerous clashes seen are between family and loyalty to one’s country throughout the play. In Antigone all the family connections are split by family devotions, and deteriorates through the strong beliefs the characters, Antigone, Creon and Ismene believe in.

Sophocles’ Antigone is a well-known Greek play, and Anouilh’s Antigone is a modern twentieth-century adaptation of it. Both deal with the aftermath of Antigone’s choice to go bury her brother Polyneices even though the king, Creon, has expressly forbidden the burial of the traitor brother. Antigone and Creon are of course the central characters, but Ismene, Antigone’s sister, is important in her own way: she is the barrier between Creon and Antigone, and presents the moral and emotional dilemma many of us deal with when reading the play Antigone. She is the one who does not want to go against the king, but wants to stand by her sister at the same time. Does this make her an indecisive character who does not know where her loyalty lies? Yes and no. Does it mean that Ismene’s character is unnecessary in the play and can thus be easily removed? This is also debatable but it is a valid question. In this essay, I will explore the character of Ismene’s loyalty in Sophocles’ version of Antigone and Anouilh’s modern adaptation of the same play. I will compare the depth of her loyalty to Antigone and Creon (family and law) in both plays to see if they are differing or similar, and based on that conclusion, I will look at her disposability as a character in both plays to find out if she is necessary as a character.

Often unaware to the reader, a story is routinely viewed through a particular lens. Our society has shaded minds to read tales through a black and white spectrum, but frequently the big picture of a story can be missed because it lies hidden within the gray area. Fairytales have influenced their apprentices to always look for a hero and a villain; however, similar to the real world, theses lines between “right” and “wrong” become indistinguishably skewed. Sophocles’ Antigone is not to be viewed through the eyes of morality because together hero and villain lie within the motives of both the play’s main characters. Simon Goldhill asserts that “it is difficult, in other words to read Antigone without making not only moral judgments, but the sort of one-sided moral judgments that the play itself seems to want to mark as leading to tragedy”, but this frame of mind must be actively fought against. The “gray area” type of mindset through which this play must be filtered is established in the assertion that conformity brings peace, but conflict brings progress. The complexity of Sophocles’ writing pleads with its readers to carefully analyze the text a second, third, or even fourth time in order to grasp the ideologies of the author in their fullest extent. This paper serves to promote such an analysis through the careful examination of the actions of Creon and Antigone, as well as the means by which Sophocles develops his “gray area”

As Aristotle distinguishes in his work of literary criticism, Poetics, part of the excitement of a tragic performance comes from the skillful structuring of the plot (muthos). In Antigone, the way in which the play is built through a series of climaxes and confrontations that culminate in the revelation of Creon’s mistake and the disclosure of the multiple deaths is characteristic.

Chanter wrote a peer-reviewed article called Tragic Dislocations: Antigone’s Modern Theatrics. Chanter attempts to analyze and explain through modern example what makes Antigone the tragedy of tragedies. He looks at Oedipus Rex, the story of Antigone’s father, a story that “furnishes the tradition with the most tragic of tragic heroes” (76) and how the problems that he brought on himself only continued to harm Antigone. Through the tragic curse that she is already born into from her father, Oedipus’s life, and the issues that arise with her brothers, in addition to the problems that she causes for herself, Antigone seems to be doomed to a tragic life story. This article enables the reader to understand the tragedy that Antigone faced an attempt