Oedipus #4

In my final journal entry, I want to discuss Sophocles' style, and I suppose the structure of the play. He references circles. Not directly. But events happen in a circle. Like Jacosta kills herself in the place where all the horribleness started: on her marriage bed. And Oedipus asks to be exiled to the Cithaeron mountains to die where he was to die when he was a baby.

The play says, "let me live on the mountains, on Cithaeron, my favorite haunt, I have made it famous. Mother and father marked out that rock to be my everlasting tomb - buried alive. Let me die there, where they tried to kill me" (246). This is Oedipus' wish to return to where his horror all started. Sophocles uses this to portray that human life, too, works as a circle. This uses the metaphor of the egg and how life keeps going and going and going and going.

Jacosta's return full circle is shown when the Messenger says "And there we saw the woman hanging by the neck, cradled high in a woven noose" (237), where she kills herself in the bedchamber. In that room, she slept with her husband, Laius, and then later her child who became her husband. That's gross, sorry. Anyway, the point is that she ended her life where Oedipus' started.

What I'm following in these books is the motif of the misguided man, but maybe also the fallen man. Oedipus has fallen when he gouges his eyes out with the pins of Jacosta's brooches. That just sounds painful.