Oedipus blinds himself at the end of Oedipus Rex because he discovers that he fulfilled a tragic prophecy that said he would kill his father and marry his mother. Oedipus first heard the prophecy as a young man living in Corinth, where he had been raised as the son of the king and queen.
Answer: Oedipus blinds himself because he cannot bear to look at the world anymore after realizing the truth about his past. He learns that he has unwittingly killed his father and married his mother, fulfilling a prophecy that he had been trying to avoid his whole life.
In fact, he was metaphorically blind to the truth of his birth for much of his life; when Oedipus finally learned the truth, he physically blinded himself by poking out his eyes with the long gold pins from his dead wife's brooches.
Seeing this, Oedipus sobbed and embraced Jocasta. He then took the gold pins that held her robes and, with them, stabbed out his eyes. He kept raking the pins down his eyes, crying that he could not bear to see the world now that he had learned the truth.
To blind himself, Oedipus uses Jocasta's golden brooches. He gorges his eyes out both to punish himself and take responsibility for his actions.
Oedipus gouging out his eyes is tragic irony because earlier in the play he insulted Tiresias for being blind in logic but he ends up making himself actually blind.
What is significant about Oedipus' blinding himself, especially with Jocasta's brooches (metal pins that held a toga together)? He feels the worst about his mother because it was incest. Using her brooches is like poetic justice, what he did to her, he is going to do to himself.
Later, when the truth became known, Jocasta committed suicide, and Oedipus (according to another version), after blinding himself, went into exile, accompanied by Antigone and Ismene, leaving his brother-in-law Creon as regent.
At the end of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, the protagonist Oedipus has gouged out his own eyes and is sent into exile. His wife (and —spoiler alert—his mother) is dead, having hung herself. The gods, it seems, have inflicted a harsh punishment on Oedipus.
At the end, Oedipus physically becomes what he had metaphorically been throughout the play: blind. As a result, Oedipus Rex demonstrates how blindness is a choice, not a physical disability, as even a person who can physically see can still act ignorant towards their actions and outcomes of their fate.
Oedipus fits this precisely, for his basic flaw is his lack of knowledge about his own identity. Moreover, no amount of foresight or preemptive action could remedy Oedipus' hamartia; unlike other tragic heroes, Oedipus bears no responsibility for his flaw.
Ultimately, his anger, rashness, and poor decision-making, despite trying to do the right thing, lead to his downfall. Oedipus' tragic flaw, his hamartia, leads to his downfall.
Nevertheless, he is also regarded as having a tremendous temper and a blindness to the truth he wishes to ignore or in some way fears. A man of great passions, Oedipus is destroyed by those very passions and is to blame for his fate because he is plagued by these tragic flaws.
The play Oedipus Rex is a literary tragedy, and its hero Oedipus' most famous character trait is also his tragic flaw: hubris, or excessive pride.
Oedipus' pride led to his downfall because he refused to listen to anyone else's advice or warnings, even from the gods, and instead relied on his own judgement and decisions. His pride prevented him from accepting the truth about his past and resulted in his exile from Thebes and his own personal suffering.
In the novel Blindness, which inspired a recently released movie by the same name, Nobel laureate Jose Saramago uses blindness as a metaphor for moral depravity, filth, and social collapse.
It represents both Robert's lack of sight and the narrator's more intangible failures of perception: his inability to understand other people's feelings and his inability to find meaning or joy in his life.
'The story will teach kids that truth is relative to one's own perspective, and because the truth is relative, we all should respect the opinions of others'. After all, their views of reality are based on a different viewpoint than our own.
Moral of the Story: Be thankful for what you have. Be creative. Be innovative. Think differently and positively.
Explanation:He tried to hide his blindness from the girl. He spoke and behaved in a manner that she could not understand his blindness. He moved to the window and pretended to look out of the train. He then went to describe the outside scenery in a way that a person from a moving train can see.
A razor-sharp debut about a woman who goes so far off the deep end, she might never make it back up… Sam James has spent years carefully crafting her reputation as the best psychologist at Typhlos, Manhattan's most challenging psychiatric institution. She believes if she can't save herself, she'll save someone else.
The novel abruptly ends without making clear in what ways people have been transformed by the horrific experience of collective blindness. As I mentioned earlier, the doctor's wife is the only character who does not go blind. She remains free from infection. This allows her to assist the group of blind people.
Oedipus is a model of Aristotle's tragic hero: he is a part of the nobility, his character flaws exacerbate his poor judgment, he loses his kingdom, and he discovers truth through his downfall.
Oedipus the King is a classic example of dramatic irony in that the audience knows that Oedipus is the killer throughout the play, but Oedipus himself is unaware of this fact. Tragic irony, which is a form of dramatic irony, is found throughout Oedipus the King.
In his attempt to flee from fate, Oedipus doomed himself to fulfill his destiny. The moral of the story is that you cannot control your destiny. This concept of fate versus free is the central motif in Oedipus the King.