Oedipus Rex

Symbols & Motifs · Oedipus Rex

Recurring objects and images — and what they carry.

1. 01

   Sight and blindness

   The play's engine. Oedipus has working eyes and understands nothing; Tiresias is blind and sees everything. Oedipus mocks the prophet for his blindness in the same scene where he is told the truth and cannot hear it. When he finally understands, the first thing he does is destroy his own eyes, because the only thing left worth refusing to look at is what he now knows.

2. 02

   The crossroads

   A place where three roads meet, where a younger man killed a stranger in a fit of road rage over the right of way. Jocasta mentions it to prove prophecies are nonsense, and it is the detail that begins the collapse. It is also the perfect image of the play's argument about choice: a junction where every road leads to the same place.

3. 03

   The riddle of the Sphinx

   What walks on four legs, then two, then three? A man. Oedipus made his name by knowing what a human being is, and the play spends two hours demonstrating that he does not know what he is. The answer that saved the city is the one thing he cannot apply to himself. He also ends the play on three legs, leaning on others, blind.

4. 04

   The swollen feet

   His name means swollen foot. His ankles were pinned together when he was left on the mountain as a baby, and he has walked on the evidence his entire life. The proof of his identity was never hidden. It was carried around by him, in his own body, under his own name, for forty years.

5. 05

   The plague

   Thebes is rotting from the inside because something unclean is sitting on the throne, and nobody can tell what it is. The city's sickness is not a punishment aimed at citizens; it is a diagnostic. The play opens with a symptom and spends its length identifying the cause.

6. 06

   Jocasta's golden brooches

   The pins that fastened her dress become the instruments he blinds himself with. The last thing his mother wore is the thing that takes his sight. Sophocles does not spell out the connection and does not need to.