The city of Thebes is "sorely vexed." The Gods are not accepting the sacrifices of the people. So they come to Oedipus the King and ask him to find out what's going on. Oedipus calls on the prophet Teiresias to tell him why the city is cursed. Teiresias knows what is going on. When Oedipus' parents had him, the oracle informed them that he would kill his father and marry his mother. So they put a wedge through his ankles and gave him to their servant to let him die of exposure. Instead, the servant gave the child to another servant, who gave the baby to a couple to raise in another city. During his travels, Oedipus gets in an argument and kills a man, who happens to be his birth father. Then, when he gets to Thebes, he solves the riddle of the sphinx and saves the city from its woes. For this, he is much "renowned," and he marries his mother, the Queen.
But Teiresias, who happens to be blind, does not want to tell Oedipus the truth. For this, Oedipus accuses Teiresias of being involved in his father's death. The blind Teiserias tells Oedipus what happened.
"And I tell thee -- since thou hast taunted me even with blindness -- that thou hast sight, yet seest not in what misery thou art, nor where thou dwellest, nor with whom. Dost thou know of what stock thou art? And thou hast been an unwitting foe to thine own kin, in the shades, and on the earth above; and the double lash of thy mother's and thy father's curse shall one day drive thee from this land in dreadful haste, with darkness then on the eyes that now see true."
I love the use of irony: the man who sees does not have a clue and the blind man can see everything. Eventually, after his wife and mother kills herself, Oedipus blinds himself (does this mean he can now see?). Oedipus cries out "Nay, to the gods I have become most hateful." And indeed, "what a stormy sea of dread he hath come!"How often do we make life decisions without knowing who we are? We choose careers, marry, choose to have kids without knowing who we really are and what we really want to be? Some of us get lucky and some of us don't. I see my role as a father to do everything I can to help my children become self aware. The problem is that self-awareness usually doesn't come until we have some life experience behind us. And we can't get life experience without taking some chances. I think this is the greatest challenge of life -- getting life experience, and self awareness, while avoiding that "stormy sea of dread trouble." This is probably one of the great challenges of being human. I wish I had some answers on how to deal with it.
In the case of Antigone, Creon the King imposes a sentence beyond his authority and gets Thebes in trouble once again. He decreed that the dead son of Oedipus, who tried to start a civil war, would not be buried and would be left to the birds and dogs. When his sister tried to bury him, Creon sentenced her to be entombed. The Gods were not happy that Creon confused the living and the dead, and once again they refused to honor the sacrifices of the city. By the time Creon recognized the error of his ways, his son who was engaged to Antigone hanged himself and his wife killed herself in anguish as well. While Creon probably had some right to impose some kind of punishment against both Antigone and her brother for breaking the law, he too lacked self-knowledge. He lacked knowledge of the limits of his authority. Once again, a blind Teiserias asks him "do thou hearken to the seer?" And when he didn't, it came back on Creon hard. At the end of the play Creon states in agony that he knows not "which way [he] should bend [his] gaze."
I'll bet, when he figured it out, he decided to bend it within.
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