antigone thesis ideas

The action of “Antigone” follows on from the Theban civil war , in which the two brothers, Eteocles and Polynices , died fighting each other for the throne of Thebes after Eteocles had refused to give up the crown to his brother as their father Oedipus had prescribed. Creon , the new ruler of Thebes, has declared that Eteocles is to be honoured and Polynices is to be disgraced by leaving his body unburied on the battlefield (a harsh and shameful punishment at the time).

As the play begins , Antigone vows to bury her brother Polynices ‘ body in defiance of Creon ‘s edict, although her sister Ismene refuses to help her, fearing the death penalty. Creon , with the support of the Chorus of elders, repeats his edict regarding the disposal of Polynices ‘ body, but a fearful sentry enters to report that Antigone has in fact buried her brother’s body.

Creon , furious at this wilful disobedience, questions Antigone over her actions, but she does not deny what she has done and argues unflinchingly with Creon about the morality of his edict and the morality of her deeds. Despite her innocence, Ismene is also summoned and interrogated and tries to confess falsely to the crime, wishing to die alongside her sister, but Antigone insists on shouldering full responsibility.

Creon ‘s son , Haemon , who is betrothed to Antigone , pledges allegiance to his father’s will but then gently tries to persuade his father to spare Antigone . The two men are soon bitterly insulting each other and eventually Haemon storms out, vowing never to see Creon again.

Creon decides to spare Ismene but rules that Antigone should be buried alive in a cave as punishment for her transgressions. She is brought out of the house, bewailing her fate but still vigorously defending her actions, and is taken away to her living tomb, to expressions of great sorrow by the Chorus.

The blind prophet Tiresias warns Creon that the gods side with Antigone , and that Creon will lose a child for his crimes of leaving Polynices unburied and for punishing Antigone so harshly. Tiresias warns that all of Greece will despise him, and that the sacrificial offerings of Thebes will not be accepted by the gods, but Creon merely dismisses him as a corrupt old fool.

However, the terrified Chorus beg Creon to reconsider, and eventually he consents to follow their advice and to free Antigone and to bury Polynices . Creon , shaken now by the prophet’s warnings and by the implications of his own actions, is contrite and looks to right his previous mistakes.

Creon now blames himself for everything that has happened and he staggers away, a broken man. The order and rule of law he values so much has been protected, but he has acted against the gods and has lost his child and his wife as a result. The Chorus closes the play with an attempt at consolation , by saying that although the gods punish the proud, punishment also brings wisdom.

Although set in the city-state of Thebes about a generation before the Trojan War (many centuries before Sophocles ’ time), the play was actually written in Athens during the rule of Pericles. It was a time of great national fervor, and Sophocles himself was appointed as one of the ten generals to lead a military expedition against Samos Island shortly after the play’s release. Given this background, it is striking that the play contains absolutely no political propaganda or contemporary allusions or references to Athens, and indeed betrays no patriotic interests whatsoever.

All the scenes take place in front of the royal palace at Thebes (conforming to the traditional dramatic principle of unity of place) and the events unfold in little more than twenty-four hours. A mood of uncertainty prevails in Thebes in the period of uneasy calm following the Theban civil war and, as the debate between the two central figures advances, the elements of foreboding and impending doom predominate in the atmosphere. The series of deaths at the end of the play, however, leaves a final impression of catharsis and an emptying of all emotion, with all passions spent.

The idealistic character of Antigone consciously risks her life through her actions, concerned only with obeying the laws of the gods and the dictates of familial loyalty and social decency. Creon , on the other hand, regards only the requirement of political expediency and physical power, although he too is unrelenting in his stance. Much of the tragedy lies in the fact that Creon ’s realization of his folly and rashness comes too late, and he pays a heavy price, left alone in his wretchedness.

It explores themes such as state control (the right of the individual to reject society’s infringement on personal freedoms and obligations); natural law vs. man-made law ( Creon advocates obedience to man-made laws, while Antigone stresses the higher laws of duty to the gods and one’s family) and the related issue of civil disobedience ( Antigone believes that state law is not absolute, and that civil disobedience is justified in extreme cases); citizenship ( Creon ‘s decree that Polynices should remain unburied suggests that Polynices ’ treason in attacking the city effectively revokes his citizenship and the rights that go with it – ”citizenship by law” rather than “citizenship by nature”); and family (for Antigone , the honour of the family outweighs her duties to the state).

Much critical debate has centred on why Antigone felt such a strong need to bury Polynices a second time in the play , when the initial pouring of dust over her brother’s body would have fulfilled her religious obligations. Some have argued that this was merely a dramatic convenience of Sophocles , while others maintain that it was a result of Antigone ’s distracted state and obsessiveness.

In the mid-20th Century, the Frenchman Jean Anouilh wrote a well-regarded version of the play, also called “Antigone” , which was deliberately ambiguous regarding the rejection or acceptance of authority, as befitted its production in occupied France under Nazi censorship.

• English translation by R. C. Jeb (Internet Classics Archive): http://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/antigone.html
• Greek version with word-by-word translation (Perseus Project): http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0185

[rating_form id=”1″]

by Sophocles

Antigone essay questions.

Why does Ismene object to Antigone's plan to bury Polyneices?

Possible Answer:

Ismene believes the men who rule Thebes must not be disobeyed because men are stronger and their will must be respected.

How does Antigone demonstrate pre-feminist ethics?

Antigone believes that a woman's duty is not to the men who rule a domain, but rather to her own instincts and her own sense of right and wrong. She believes that the gods do not dictate through a ruler, but rather through individual beliefs.

When does Creon become apologetic for his actions?

Creon never apologizes for his actions. Instead, he simply orders Antigone to be freed because he knows that Teiresias is never wrong - and therefore that his own life is at risk. However, he never truly believes that his order to imprison her was the wrong course of action.

What is the seeming reason for Haemon's suicide? Does he kill himself only out of desperate love for the dead Antigone?

Haemon's suicide seems to have two motivations - first out of anguish over Antigone's death, but also because he is so furious with his father for having betrayed his trust. Early in the play, Haemon tells his father that as long as he offers wisdom, Haemon will follow him. But now it is clear that his father led him astray, and for that Haemon believes that one of them must die.

Why isn't Creon killed by the plague that befalls him at the play's end?

Creon's punishment is to suffer without a family, and to suffer the guilt of knowing he destroyed the lives of innocents to preserve obsolete traditions and a misconceived legacy of misogynist rule.

What is Creon's tragic flaw?

Creon's tragic flaw is that he believes that men have the right to interpret divine will and impose absolute power in their name. As a result, a simple belief - men cannot be wrong in the face of women - is elevated to law and thus leads to multiple (unnecessary) deaths.

Is Antigone ever apologetic for burying Polyneices?

Though Antigone bemoans her fate and believes death is a cruel and unnecessary punishment for burying Polyneices, she is never apologetic for actually covering his body. She believes until the end that she did the right thing.

Why does Antigone not allow Ismene to join her in her death sentence?

Antigone does not want her sister laying claim to an act that was solely hers for two reasons: one, because she wants her sister to remain alive, and two, because she wants her sister to feel the shame of abandoning her principles for the sake of staying alive and being subservient to men.

What is the role of the Chorus?

The Chorus is meant to reflect the conscience of Thebes - they are the elders who expect Creon to guide them towards wisdom. As they lead him astray, they begin to sense this and reflect their feelings in their choral poems.

What is unusual about the Watchman's speech?

Unlike the other characters, the Watchman's speech is written in more natural rhythms and dialect.

Antigone Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Antigone is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

How does the play begin?What impact does this technique or beginning have on the audience?

In her very first speech, Antigone only briefly alludes to her and her sister's circumstances, but a Greek audience would have quickly filled in the gaps created by this 'in media res' device (meaning that Sophocles begins the story 'in the middle...

demonstration of pre feminist ethics in sophocles antigone

Antigone's gender has profound effects on the meaning of her actions. Creon himself says that the need to defeat her is all the more pressing because she is a woman. The freedom of Greek women was extremely limited; the rules and strictures placed...

Whose rights should assume priority - Creon's to legislate and punish, or Antigone's to bury her brother? Is there any way to resolve the competing claims of Creon and Antigone?

I like Antigone. Some critics see Antigone as too self-righteous, even alienating, but others claim her as a seminal feminist, determined to do what is right even in defiance of patriarchal law. Indeed, Antigone captured the public imagination...

Study Guide for Antigone

Antigone study guide contains a biography of Sophocles, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Antigone
• Antigone Summary
• Character List
• Lines 001-241 Summary and Analysis

Essays for Antigone

Antigone essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Antigone by Sophocles.

• Influence of Antigone on A Doll's House
• The Use of Light and Dark Images in Antigone
• Batman and Creon: Denied the Glory?
• Relativist Justice in Antigone
• Hubris in Antigone and Oedipus

Lesson Plan for Antigone

• About the Author
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Antigone
• Relationship to Other Books
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Antigone Bibliography

E-Text of Antigone

Antigone e-text contains the full text of Antigone by Sophocles.

Wikipedia Entries for Antigone

• Introduction

“The Antigone” by Sophocles: Characters and Plot Research Paper

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Characters and the plot of the antigone, character of ismene, character of creon, sophocles years of life, the antigone, works cited.

Antigone by Sophocles is a classic Ancient Greek play. It is well-known all over the world for the morality and brevity of the main character. Moreover, the play discovers a causative-consecutive line of tragic events that make it rich in content. The author provides the majority of emotional and logical features in characters using their dialogues or monologues. In this respect, one should not underestimate the role of the chorus. This instrumentation was used by Sophocles in all his plays to make conversation between characters as well as the tragedy of the moment more impressive. The play is performed in the tradition of classic Greek tragedy. Characters and the plot of The Antigone are highlighted in the play for resolving the problem of morale and pride in human beings and the counter-reaction of gods in response.

Looking at the elaboration of actions in the play, it is significant to work out the problem of the development and change in a character. In this respect, one should keep an eye on two characters: Creon and Ismene. These two are identified in the play, as unstable and despaired people. In the case of Ismene, she betrayed her sister Antigone by being afraid of the death penalty. Her involvement in actions that were in defiance of Creon’s edict is shaped with great fear for burying their brothers: “I do them no dishonor, but I find myself too weak to war against the state” (Sophocles 12). When Antigone was pledged Ismene refused to be for her sister. One sees her, as a weak character without family identification and duties. She placed duty to the polis higher than the duty to her family (Markos 146). This parameter makes her actions immoral and going apart from Greek family tradition.

Another feature defining Ismene is her disgrace of sacred duty to bury the bodies of Eteocles and Polynices. In this respect, Antigone emerges, as “the still small voice”. She persuades Ismene to follow her pieces of advice even under the threat of death. Looking at such weighty arguments, one sees that the entire nature of morale is more represented in Antigone. Sophocles wants to show her tries to make Ismene do what is right. That starting moment in the play illustrates what both sisters felt. However, it also predicts the end of the play and its tragic outcomes. Antigone attempts to break Ismene’s desire to follow the cruel edict of Creon down. The main heroine is shown in the play, as one who speaks with passion and moral supremacy (Pedrick and Oberhelman 92). To lay more emphasis on Antigone’s courage and decisiveness, it is better to estimate the words of her toward Ismene, namely: “Fear not for me. Thine own fate guide me aright” (Sophocles 12). Such words represent a challenge for both sisters that was passed only by Antigone.

Creon is another character in whom a reader can see a change. However, it is apparent solely in the final scene of the play. Analyzing his command to assess the highest punishment to Eteocles and Polynices, he wanted to make his power and his position in the city of Thebes firm. The thing is that such firmness was built on a shaky basis. The will of gods was neglected due to Creon’s pride and hypocrisy. Initially, he was sure that such aggressive methods will destroy any defiant person. Creon admits his righteousness in ruling using the rhetoric question: “And will my subjects tell me how to rule” (Sophocles 45)? Unfortunately to Creon, Antigone was that woman who valued family more than polis.

Thus, one can describe Creon, as the embodiment of polis, power, and law, and Antigone is supposed to kinship and persistence in moral aspects (Markell 66). Even with immoral actions by Creon Sophocles provides a gorgeous message in actions by Antigone. Such relation of people to gods is indicated in all Ancient Greek plays. Though Creon stays firm in his will to punish Antigone, he does not even recognize the price of losses, as a result. He repeats the eternal mistake of human beings by acting without realizing the moral or rational grounds of this or that action. Creon follows the wrong way of opposition to gods and the good fate of his own. His conviction in the righteousness of his actions is, without any doubt, unsound. He leads his whole life toward decline.

The genius of Sophocles lies in the definition of is total ruination of a person’s life. Ignoring the family values of one person, Creon lost their own family’s well-being. The play distinctively depicts this tragic moment of Creon’s confession and his inner change, as a result: “Ah me! The fault is mine” (Sophocles 74). This scene characterizes Creon, as a man caught by personal fallacies and ignorance of sacred features for a man, such as family.

Creon is a tragic character, for the ominous but fair payback appeared in his life. A man should study the mistakes he/she does. It is even better not to be trapped in disasters by some distinct examples from the experiences of other people. The educational nature of the play is implied in the fact that at last Creon has understood his error. In the final scene, a viewer notices the sorrows of Creon. Here the tragedy is evaluated because he desires death more than relief. Creon presupposes it, as a form of some relief: “That nevermore I look upon the light” (Sophocles 74)… This punishment of Creon is directed to everyone who seeks wisdom.

Thus, Ismene and Creon are characters who are going through the process of change. Ismene is depicted, as the only ally to her sister. However, she demonstrates faint-heartedness at the moment when Creon summons both Ismene and Antigone to tell about their crime. Creon, driven by his persuasion in the righteousness of his edicts, ignores the family values and morality of tradition and the will of gods. On the one hand, Ismene stayed unchanged toward personal fears. On the other hand, Creon smarted for his pride and cruelty using his son’s and wife’s suicides. The story teaches about following the duty to secure moral values more than the duties of the polis.

Sophocles (497/6 BC- 406/5 BC) is an outstanding Ancient Greek playwright (Sophocles 5). He along with Aeschylus and Euripides contributed greatly to the heritage of Greek drama that is extant to contemporary observers. The most attractive plays of Sophocles are Oedipus and Antigone. These plays counterbalanced the achievements of previous playwrights in the mastership of drama and tragedy, in particular.

Sophocles made the instrumentation in his plays more expressive and distinct from other authors due to a reduction of chorus roles to a limited extent. On the other hand, he improved the role of characters and their fates to some higher extent. Additionally, he involved the third and, later on, the fourth actor in his plays (Sophocles 6). As distinct from Aeschylus, Sophocles did not create trilogies describing one theme in a complex of each play. His plays, such as The Antigone or Oedipus are complete in themselves (Sophocles 6). The success of his earliest plays, The Antigone , was obvious to every Greek who settled Attica and Athens as well. It was dated to the late third century BC, but contemporary researchers in ancient literature cannot define a distinct date. It is thought that the play had been written around 441-440 BC (Sophocles, Fainlight and Littman 5).

Furthermore, this play had made Sophocles the winner at the Festival of Dionysus. It is known that by Aristophanes of Byzantium’s appointment of Sophocles, as a general in the Samian War 441/440 BC, Sophocles overcame Aeschylus who was the winner for many years (Sophocles, Fainlight and Littman 6). He also overcame Euripides who had won this prize a year before.

Describing the civil war between Eteocles and Polyneices in common features, Sophocles directs his thoughts toward rigor of law and significance of morale. These two features imposed into the main theme of the play that resonated with viewers such great success of Sophocles (Sophocles, Fainlight and Littman 8). Since the moment of his victory at the Festival of Dionysus Sophocles became persona grata in Athens in terms of art and social issues. Up to his death, Sophocles never gave up personal participation in the artistic and social affairs of Greece.

Markell Patchen. Bound by recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Markos, Louis. From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics . Westmont, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007.

Pedrick, Victoria and Oberhelman, Steven M. The soul of tragedy: essays on Athenian drama. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Sophocles. Antigone. Translated by Plumptre E. H. New York: Digireads.com Publishing, 2005.

Sophocles, Fainlight, Ruth and Littman, Robert J. The Theban Plays: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone. Translated by Fainlight, Ruth and Littman, Robert J. Baltimore, MD: JHU Press, 2009.

• Is Regina from “The Little Foxes” by Lillian Hellman a Tragic Character?
• “Antigone” by Sophocles and “Blood Wedding” by F. Garcia Lorca
• The Play “Antigone“ by Sophocles: Summary
• Higher Law in The Antigone Play
• Family Ties and Obligations as the Driver of Antigone’s Actions in Sophocles’ Play
• Shakespeare’s "Hamlet": The Use of Allusion and Metaphors
• Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”: Function of Conflict
• Role of a Writer in Reflecting the Reality
• “Romeo and Juliet” Staged in Greek Style
• This Is Our Youth by Kenneth Lonergan
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, September 5). “The Antigone” by Sophocles: Characters and Plot. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-antigone-by-sophocles-characters-and-plot/

"“The Antigone” by Sophocles: Characters and Plot." IvyPanda , 5 Sept. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/the-antigone-by-sophocles-characters-and-plot/.

IvyPanda . (2022) '“The Antigone” by Sophocles: Characters and Plot'. 5 September.

IvyPanda . 2022. "“The Antigone” by Sophocles: Characters and Plot." September 5, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-antigone-by-sophocles-characters-and-plot/.

1. IvyPanda . "“The Antigone” by Sophocles: Characters and Plot." September 5, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-antigone-by-sophocles-characters-and-plot/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "“The Antigone” by Sophocles: Characters and Plot." September 5, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-antigone-by-sophocles-characters-and-plot/.

The many meanings of Anouilh’s Antigone

• December 7, 2022

Marie Daouda

• Themes: Culture, France

The French playwright Jean Anouilh's retelling of the Antigone myth was claimed as inspiration by both the Resistance and Vichy supporters. But who was the real Antigone?

The seventeenth-century French tradition of adapting classic Greek tragedies came back into fashion in the inter-war period. Jean Cocteau ( La Machine infernale,  1934) and Jean Giraudoux ( La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu , 1935) rekindled the Oedipean and Trojan legends in a French present. In parallel, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus wrote plays that presented contemporary political and philosophical views in action. At the crossroads between antique inspiration and modern debates,  Jean Anouilh’s  Antigone premiered on February 4 1944, while Paris was under Nazi occupation.

The theatre was then a welcome source of entertainment and escapism , as well as a literal stage of an intellectual rebellion against totalitarianism. In Sophocles’ 440 BC play, Antigone, a young woman, stands against authority, embodied by her Uncle Creon. Popular culture remembers her as the pious daughter of accursed Oedipus, following her father in exile and only coming back to Thebes to die for having tried to bury her brother. The Résistance saw Anouilh’s Antigone as one of them:  writer and critic Simone  Fraisse affirms that ‘the spirit of the Résistance recognised itself in her.’ Sartre objected that Anouilh’s play was too kind to Creon, and therefore too conciliatory towards the figure of the oppressor. The far-right saluted the play for revealing Antigone as a ‘little goddess of Anarchy’ who had to be crushed for the preservation of the social order.

Anouilh never clarified the political dimension of his  Antigone . His creations are much less political than the plays of Sartre and Camus . Yet Anouilh also mentioned that the writing of the play was prompted by his obsession with the ‘little red leaflets,’ collaborationist  posters that presented members of the Résistance as terrorists ready to kill French civilians to  fulfill their goals.

Antigone obeys the strict rules of seventeenth-century French theatre, inherited from Horatius and Aristotle. The action unfolds through a single plot, in a single space, with no rupture in temporal continuity: Antigone’s fate is witnessed, it seems, under the very eyes of the audience, who would have been familiar with the plot. Antigone is one of the four children whom Oedipus, king of Thebes, had with his own mother, Jocasta, after he killed his father and freed the city from the Sphinx. When the two brothers Eteocles and Polynices fight each other to death, Creon, brother of Jocasta and now king of Thebes, gives a worthy funeral to Eteocles, who was defending the city, and orders that Polynices’s body be left unburied, rotting under the sun. Antigone escapes before dawn to offer her brother the funerary rites, in full knowledge that she will be killed for defying the law.

A frequent misunderstanding sees Antigone as a revolutionary and a rebel. Sophocles, in fact, made her more strictly law-abiding than Creon. She transgresses Creon’s orders because they come neither from Zeus nor from ‘Justice who lives with the gods below’ (l. 450-451). The laws she follows are ‘the unwritten and unfailing ordinances of the gods.’ Aristotle quotes Sophocles’ play as an illustration of Natural Law , as representative of unbreakable principles, woven into mankind regardless of place and time, such as the piety binding family members together. They have a higher authority than the rules set by lawgivers, whose function is not to make up laws, but to see how the principles must be applied in particular circumstances. For Antigone, piety — the duty owed to the gods through the respect due to a dead body — is the highest principle.

Sophocles’ Theban plays already illustrate the characters’ complex response to moral imperatives. In  Oedipus King , Oedipus curses Creon, accusing him of having plotted his demise; then is bound by his own decree to inflict punishment upon himself. In  Oedipus at Colonus , he curses Polynices for his falsehood. Sophocles gives capital importance to the power of the king’s speech. As a lawgiver, the king utters words that are as binding as divine decrees.

The conflict of authority between Antigone and Creon is at the core of Anouilh’s play. Anouilh winds the tragic spring: a prologue character in modern clothes describes the characters and summarises the plot.  Anouilh transposes the Oedipian tale to the days of fast cars and champagne parties, but his  prologue and the nourrice [wet nurse] who serves as Antigone’s confidant, albeit absent from Sophocles’ play, are direct imports of the Greek theatre. The encounters between Antigone and her sister Ismène are rigorously close to Sophocles. Anouilh even kept the embarrassed explanations of the guard hesitating to tell Creon that the body has been buried. However, Anouilh gives more stage space and density to the web of family relations around Antigone. On what has to be the last day of her life, her nanny reminds her of childhood memories. Antigone reminds Hémon of the little boy they wish to have. This makes the young woman’s death even more untimely, increasing the dramatic tension between the characters’ struggle under the hand of fate and what Antigone and the audience know to be inevitable.

It would be tempting to see Anouilh’s play as an enthusiastic defence of young, revolted Antigone, with her tired, sleepless face and her nails darkened with the soil of her brother’s grave, against old, authoritative, and bourgeois Creon. Yet many critics, Sartre included, thought Anouilh had been too kind to Creon, trying his best to save his niece from her fate, talking her into pretending nothing happened, so that she could marry Hémon, ‘give him a chubby baby boy’, and live a happy, normal life. In Sophocles’ play, Creon gives no chance of escaping to Antigone; nor does he exert physical violence against her, as in Anouilh’s play. Anouilh’s Creon is not more humane, but merely more human. Just as in Sophocles’ play, he gets carried away by his own authority. In that sense, Anouilh’s play focuses on a major aspect of Sophocles’ Theban cycle: how could mortal, finite humans deal with the god-like power of legal authority?

Sophocles’ Creon might have seemed more sympathetic to his contemporaries. He is the king, therefore the father of the city. According to the Greek laws on orphaned daughters, by marrying his son Haemon to Antigone, he loses his own heir to ensure the survival of Oedipus’s house. By refusing to bury Polynices, he inflicts a rightful punishment upon a man who attacked his own brother and, even worse, his own city. Yet just as Oedipus is struck by the hubris of law-making, ordaining a punishment that turns against him, Creon gradually gets intoxicated by his own authority. He first dismisses Antigone’s warning about the Gods’ will, then he casts out Haemon, who intercedes for Antigone in the name of the people who now side with her and object to her punishment. Seeing his father’s dismissal of the people’s voice, Haemon remarks that he is fit to rule on a desert island (l. 740) Creon accuses his son-to-be of taking the side of women against his king and father, and of turning the structure of authority upside down.  The unwritten law that Creon forgets about is the protective duty of the leader towards his people. Creon, who already overlooked the hierarchy between legitimate man-made laws and superior laws from the gods below, also overlooks the hierarchy between the voice of the people and his own.

Creon’s failure as a father to his people foreshadows his failure as a father and a husband. As Teiresias prophesied it, eventually, Creon loses his son and his wife because his obsession with his own law turns into a disruption of the general and natural order. Just as Oedipus blurred the laws of lineage, becoming a ‘begetter of brothers-sons’ ( King Oedipus , l. 1400), Creon’s order to bury Antigone alive and to let Polynices rot in the open air puts the living young woman where the dead belong, and leaves the dead in the realm of the living. Sophocles’ play leads to marvel upon mankind’s seemingly limitless power to go against invisible laws, and upon the cost that comes with transgression.

Anouilh’s Antigone does not say much about owing anything to the gods. When she is asked about the reason for her gesture, she replies: ‘For nothing. For myself.’ When Créon urges her to explain her desperate gesture, all she says is that she would do it again. Her gesture towards Polynice is the last token of affection of a younger sister to a much older brother who has only been kind to her once. Anouilh creates a tense relation between Polynice and Œdipe, as Creon mentions an incident when the son punched his father in the face for refusing him money. Beyond the transposition of the family conflict into the Roaring Twenties, this memory also sketches the lack of filial piety presented in Oedipus in Colona, more vividly than the political plotting of both sons against their father. Upon hearing this, Anouilh’s Antigone maintains she would go back to finish the burial; but Anouilh adds a final blow. Creon reveals to Antigone that, after the gruesome mess of the battle, as the two brothers were disfigured, he picked the least gruesome body for the burial, not caring which one it was.

The name is torn off the corpse; Antigone’s gesture is reduced to its bareness, severed from any bond of piety or obedience. It marks the end of speech and arguing, and even the end of lyricism. As she is now sure of her useless and inevitable death, Antigone utters the first line of Sophocles’ heroine’s dirge: ‘So to my grave, my bridal bower’. The French translation’s elegiac tone strikes against the simple, unaffected prose of the play: ‘Ô Tombeau, ô lit nuptial, ô ma demeure souterraine!…’   Then Antigone stops in silence, only to whisper: ‘ Toute seule’ — ‘All alone.’ It is not until then that Anouilh’s little Antigone becomes Antigone as announced by the prologue, and fulfills the programme announced in her name — against her own kin, and in front of her own kin. Antigone, ‘la petite Antigone,’ is the one who stands before her sister, her fiancé, her uncle, who all urge her to be happy, and says ‘no’.

The Résistance heard this ‘no’ as though it were her own voice — the voice of a weak minority that fought to death against a giant, knowing that the fight was hopeless. The far-right heard this ‘no’ as a symptom of self-destructive nihilism. This does not add up with one of Anouilh’s most moving monologues, where Antigone tells Ismène about her love for life: ‘who would wake up first, in the morning, just to feel the cold air on her naked skin? Who could go to bed last, just because she was exhausted, just to live one little bit more of night? Who used to cry, as a child, thinking that there were so many little beasts, so many blades of grass in the field and that one could not take them all?’

In Sophocles’ play, Creon discovers how much his niece is like her father: ‘Like father, like daughter, passionate, wild… she hasn’t learned to bend before adversity.’ Anouilh’s Antigone is more striking because she knows she is too small for her role and yet she must die ‘parce qu’elle s’appelle Antigone’ — ‘because she is named Antigone’. Many of Anouilh’s characters, like Eurydice in the eponymous play and Thérèse in  La Sauvage  (1942), revolt against the permanent compromise of happiness, which they consider impure, and rush towards death as a purifying fire that will cleanse them from the necessary contradictions and negotiations of life. Tragedy does not negotiate. Just as Hémon’s mother only appears on stage to die in her own appointed time, each character, from the most insignificant to the most central, has to fulfill what is written. Anouilh’s Choir says: ‘Tragedy is clean […] It is restful, because we know there is no hope, that hope, filthy hope, is no more, that one is caught like a rat, and that there is nothing left to do but to scream […] what, perchance, we didn’t even know till then. […] It is gratuitous. It is for kings.’

Anouilh’s Antigone says no and thus remains and dies in the world of tragedy; Creon says yes and leaves the stage, not in a scream of pain, maddened with grief at the cost of his own hubris as Sophocles’ Creon, but leaning on a young page, walking slowly towards the next task that must be accomplished, the next burden in the long humdrum of everyday life. Antigone must be Antigone and Creon must be Creon, because he said yes to power and to the messiness of life. None of them can step out of the road traced by fate. Behind its modern staging and its echoes of 1940s France, Anouilh’s Antigone pays tribute to Sophocles, baring the irreconcilable tensions between the individual, law, and authority. It casts a light on the cost of saying no, but also on the cost of saying yes. In either case, the self undergoes a destruction, be it slow and gradual like Creon’s, or radical and spectacular like Antigone. Although Anouilh claimed he wished to stay away from the philosophical controversies of his time, his mastery shines out in his understanding of human life as a sequence of necessary choices that have to be followed with uncompromising faithfulness. Anouilh discloses with a heart-rending simplicity that human existence is intertwined with tragedy. Whether we say yes or no, a burden of choice is laid on our shoulders, and our sole hope is to embrace the consequences of our choice — Antigone’s ‘no’ or Creon’s ‘yes’ — in full awareness and acceptance of the cost that comes with it.

More from Culture

Japan’s time of monsters, poetry, prose and the battle for paradise lost, evelyn waugh and anthony powell – visions of a vanished britain, ismail kadare walked the line, ‘we were there with the history makers, really finding out what they thought and felt’ – in conversation with norma percy, more from france, the many meanings of the age of upheaval, the entente cordiale: bad history but good politics, contradictions at the heart of an expanding europe, de gaulle’s world in motion, the special role that never was, latest essays, how censorship conquered the world, again, the australian way of war and peace, history shows a perilous path lies ahead for kamala harris, the paradox of nuclear strategy.

• Environment
• Information Science
• Social Issues
• Argumentative
• Cause and Effect
• Classification
• Compare and Contrast
• Descriptive
• Exemplification
• Informative
• Controversial
• Exploratory
• What Is an Essay
• Length of an Essay
• Generate Ideas
• Types of Essays
• Structuring an Essay
• Outline For Essay
• Essay Introduction
• Thesis Statement
• Body of an Essay
• Writing a Conclusion
• Essay Writing Tips
• Drafting an Essay
• Revision Process
• Fix a Broken Essay
• Format of an Essay
• Essay Examples
• Essay Checklist
• Essay Writing Service
• Pay for Research Paper
• Write My Research Paper
• Write My Essay
• Custom Essay Writing Service
• Admission Essay Writing Service
• Pay for Essay
• Academic Ghostwriting
• Write My Book Report
• Case Study Writing Service
• Dissertation Writing Service
• Coursework Writing Service
• Lab Report Writing Service
• Do My Assignment
• Buy College Papers
• Capstone Project Writing Service
• Buy Research Paper
• Custom Essays for Sale

Can’t find a perfect paper?

• Free Essay Samples

Essays on Antigone

Antigone is a tragedy of the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles, staged in 442 BC, while Antigone essay follows the events set in Thebes, ancient Egypt. Antigone essays depict how after Antigone’s brothers Eteocles and Polynices were killed by each other in war, King Creon rose to power and detected that Polyneices should not be buried as killer and traitor. Essays on Antigone analyze her actions as she disagreed because religion dictated that every person must be buried, otherwise their soul won't find peace. Essays show how she attempted to bury Polyneices and was walled up alive. She was the fiancée of Creon’s son, who killed himself out of grief, and his mother followed him. And so Creon lost his family because he defied divine law. Peruse Antigone essay samples below for details of this story. Our essay samples also include its complete analysis.

Authored before or in 441 BC at a time of national enthusiasm, exposing the dangers of absolute ruler also referred as a tyrant. In the play setting, this played by Creon, a king whom people could hardly give their opinion about him. Despite regretting his actions as the play ends,...

Words: 1226

Sophocle’s Antigone is a play of expansive and lasting well known appeal. However, it is ironical that most of the play’s admirers have hardly arrived at a concurrence regarding its interpretation. This paper seeks to discuss one character in the play, Creon, who becomes the new king of Thebes following...

Words: 1121

Sophocles play depicts a conflict between moral and political laws Sophocles play depicts a conflict that exists even in the day today. Essentially, this conflict is in regard to moral laws and political laws that are manmade. The characters in the play Antigone clash because of these laws since each of...

This is a Greek tragic play that explains the moral and ethical dilemmas. The play unearths the ethical dilemma existing between the proponents of the human law and the strict adherents of the law of gods. Since the two laws are different, one had to choose only one law to...

Words: 1207

In a social order, every man including those in power is limited to some boundaries beyond which one cannot cross without consequences. Antigone by Sophocles presents a society on the verge of self-destruction through sickness as a result of the transgressions of a king. The King of Thebes, Creon violates the...

Found a perfect essay sample but want a unique one?

Request writing help from expert writer in you feed!

They tell Creon has vowed that no one shall bury him, that no one shall weep for him, but that his corpse shall lie in the fields,.... for carrion birds to dig while they hunt for food.” Creon, the king, has ceremoniously buried one of Antigone's brothers while refusing to...

Sophocles' tragedy "Antigone" Sophocles' tragedy "Antigone" was composed in or around 441 BC (Honig). The play is set in Thebes, where two heirs, Eteocles and Polynices, contend for Oedipus' kinship throne. Eteocles starts the war by sitting on the throne against Oedipus' orders. Both of them are killed on the battlefields....

Antigone and Othello: A Critical Analysis of Love Antigone is a tragedy play written around 442 BCE by Sophocles about the burial of Antigone's brother Polynices against the rule of Crone and the country, as well as the tragic effects of her act of civil disdain. Othello is a tragedy play...

Words: 1268

Antigone is a play with a theme of political tragedy and a heroic literary character that has been applied to modern society across a broad spectrum. Theatrical version is one of the best elements of plays in the literature intended to relive the incidents in the historical and cultural context...

Related topic to Antigone

You might also like.