Antigone
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Antigone's manifest action is fairly straightforward, but uncommonly strong conflicts and ideas are embedded in the action and embodied by the characters. King Creon's niece Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, disobeys a direct royal order against performing a burial of her brother, dishonored in the horrific late siege of Thebes. When she is found out she defies Creon, who condemns her to a slow death in a sealed cave. Challenged in turn by his son Haemon, who was betrothed to Antigone, and the irksome soothsayer Tieresias, who reminds Creon that he, too, is mortal, Creon relents--too late. Antigone has hanged herself, Haemon has killed himself, and Creon's wife Eurydice, crushed by Haemon's loss, has dispatched herself too. Creon's opponents are gone, and he is in fact what he has spent most of the play insisting he must be: sole head of state. He is also remorseful, guilty, solitary.Antigone is laden with symbols and images that refer to fundamentals of human experience. At one level, Antigone can be seen as the symbol of individual conscience, representative of obligations to social authority and family feeling. She privileges conscience from the opening lines of the play: "I intend to give [Polyneices] burial. . . . He is our brother. I will do my duty, / Yours too, perhaps. I never will be false" (Ant. 43-46). Her duty, by Creon's decree, merits a sentence of stoning. Antigone's action becomes a personified critique of injustice that masquerades as legitimate state authori
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ea of how important it is to "act[] out of one of the fundamental necessities of human life, or in response to . . . sacred instincts . . . working with the gods, and the gods with him" (155). In other words, Antigone stands for a principle cosmically higher than the manifest conflict with Creon.
The implications and far-reaching consequences of Creon's disregard of family ties, which was plain enough from his original decree since Polyneices was his nephew, also begin to emerge after he sentences Antigone. He conceives of an almost wry method of "stoning" her and of forcing a particular cosmic context upon her: "Along a desolate pathway I will lead her, / And shut her, living, in a rocky vault / With no more food than will appease the gods . . . Hades, who is the only god she worships, / May hear her prayers" (724-29). The image of a lingering death from being buried alive replicates Creon's defilement of burial ritual. Another image is inescapable: Polyneices' body, perversely "resurrected" and now rotting in the open for the third time, two solemn burials of his body having been insufficient against Creon's will. The meaning of all of this is to reinforce how profoundly Creon has violated cosmic imperatives and upset universal
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1346
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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