The purpose of this research is to examine speeches of Oedipus, Creon, and Teiresias in Sophocles's Oedipus the King with a view toward explaining what the speeches reveal about each character. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context for the emergence of the dramatic pattern of ideas contained in the text and then to discuss how these various speeches function as means of clarifying and unifying the ideas underlying the events of the plot.
What must be understood above all about Oedipus the King is that it is a play permeated with irony of incident, character behavior, and plot resolution. It appears that it is on that basis that in the Poetics Aristotle considers Oedipus the King to be the world's greatest tragedy, fulfilling and then going beyond his basic conditions of a tragedy, that it be an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with every kind of artistic ornament; the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play, in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions (Aristotle 939).
The form of action in Oedipus the King is of course the language and behavior of the characters. The irony that emerges in the course of the play is a function of the discrepancy between what they say and do and what eventually happens to them and to others around them as events unfold. In that regard, it is particularly in Aristotle's discussion of reversal, or a dramatic change of conditions to their áopposite, and recognition/discovery, which is a transformation for the characters from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge, Aristotle takes his text from Oedipus, a primary text of the golden age. "The best form of recognition is coincident with a reversal of the situation, as in the Oedipus" (Aristotle 941). Indeed, in Oedipus, reversal and recognition occur at the same moment, thus als...