o inciting pity, fear, and catastrophe at the same moment, specifically, when the king discovers the source of the plague (himself), that he had killed his father after all, that he has taken his mother as a wife. In his determination to answer one main question of the play--what caused the plague--he answers another main question--who am I--principally because of his dogged and imperious determination to "start afresh and make dark things clear" (Sophocles 35). Once made clear, of course, they darken immediately. This, then, is the context in which key character speeches can be analyzed and in which they can be connected to the tragic pattern that emerges in the play.
The ironic disconnect between what Oedipus says and what he does is evident, from the perspective of one who knows how the play ends, from the beginning. Indeed, Oedipus's first line can be interpreted as ironic: "Children, youngest brood of Cadmus the old" (33). In point of blood fact, principally Oedipus, and by extension his own children, are the true descendants of Cadmus, identified in the Gassner translation as the founder of Thebes (33). Declaring himself above all ready to hear out the priest, Oedipus is actually declaring áhimself vulnerable to information that will be the source of his destruction. In conversation with Creon he commits himself to the rite of purification, whereby the pollution of Thebes can be driven out. Oedipus himself, incestuous husband of his mother Jocasta, is the pollution, and he not only drives himself out of the city, a public act, but also engages the mortification of the flesh that becomes a rite of personal purification.
"I will start afresh and make dark things clear . . . Not on behalf of one unknown but in my own interest" (35), Oedipus explains, just before the first entrance of the Chorus. This speech essentially sets forth the core irony that drives the action of the play. He is asserting his authority as king to "erase...