Antigone

The title of a tragedy usually tips the audience off as to who is the tragic hero of the play. For example, Hamlet, Oedipus the King, and Dr. Faustus are all famous plays in which the hero plays the title role. However, Sophocles’ Antigone raises eyebrows when its title character dies off screen and the antagonist is left alive in the final moments of the play, full of regret and sorrow. For many years, critics have questioned if the character Creon was actually the intended hero of the play, not Antigone. According to Aristotle’s Poetics, the tragic hero is the character with whom the audience feels pity for and fears a similar condition, but the issue with Antigone is that it works on many different levels: male vs. female, subject vs. ruler, father vs. son, family vs. politics, human law vs. supernatural law. This makes it hard for the audience to resonate with only one character which is why Antigone and Creon serve the purpose of warning the audience of two different types of blindness: blindness in faith and blindness in power.

Antigone buries her brother Polynices despite the law that Creon has passed forbidding anyone to do so. Antigone claims that Creon “has no right to keep me from my own” (59, italicized for emphasis). This brings forth the issue of man-made law versus the holy law of the gods. There are many moments in the play in which it seem as though Sophocles tries to lean the audience towards sympathizing with Antigone: he refers to her as a mother bird who “came back to an empty nest” when she is crying over Polynices body and he also includes a long speech (lines 980 - 1020) in which Antigone laments her would-be married life with Haemon and pleads to know what she did wrong, as she believes she was just following the law of the gods. However, right before this long speech the Chorus speaks to Antigone:

Reverence asks some reverence in return -

but attacks on power never go unchecked,

not by the man who holds the reins of power.

Your own blind will, your passion has destroyed you. (959 -962)

Antigone responds by saying “the law forbids me to see the sacred eye of day” (965), to which Creon answers “Can’t you see?” (970). There is a play on words here in which Antigone is “blind” to her wrongdoings; she can not see that her faith in the gods has caused her to take extreme measures and wound up becoming a blind martyr to their law.

This play on blindness appears again right before Creon’s epiphany when the Leader states:

The king himself! Coming towards us,

look, holding the boy’s head in his hands.

Clear damning proof, if it’s right to say so -

proof of his own madness, no one else’s,

no, his own blind wrongs. (1388 - 92)

“Wrongs” here refer to Creon’s actions that went against the will of the gods. His wrongs were blind because, in his mind, he was doing what was right politically: to bury the body of a traitor to the state would have shown weakness on his part, and since he is a new ruler, this could have caused disloyalty among his peoples. However, Sophocles reminds the audience that the gods’ rules are the right ones by punishing Creon for his lack of judgement. Creon was blind to the familial love that Antigone had for her brother and so Creon has his son and wife taken away from him (“I just held my son in my arms, and now, / look, a new corpse rising before my eyes -” (1423 - 24).

There are many other moments throughout the play in which Sophocles plays on the idea of blindness, like the blind “seer,” or oracle, and the blindness of the audience to both Antigone’s, Haemon’s, and Eurydice’s deaths, but the two mentioned above are most important in determining Sophocles’ message: when one becomes so overwhelmed by something, be it faith, love, or power, that they become “blinded” by it, it leads to their downfall. By portraying this message through two tragic heroes instead of one, this helps the audience see the dangers of extreme belief from different angles and points of view.