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Description:

A distraught and helpless Oedipus questions fate and free will when he discovers that he's killed his father and married his mother. 


Transcript

00:00

Thank you We sneak in What if it's the king

00:07

Ah la shmoop The baby was from dacosta Edifice is

00:15

acosta's son The man he killed of the crossroads was

00:19

most likely his original father And that he went on

00:23

to marry his mother What do you do with this

00:27

information Out of his run out of the room Screaming

00:32

seems appropriate Yes it's really The only thing that you

00:35

could do And at this point there's a lot of

00:38

in the air I mean the play stops for a

00:41

moment to allow him to think about his life Has

00:44

he had free will Does he still have free will

00:48

It seems as though he doesn't Everything he's ever done

00:51

has led to these two key actions So adamis wanders

00:55

for a while thinking about these things and then returns

01:01

what he finds there is that shit Kostya has hanged

01:03

herself Well yeah Another predictable but still incredibly distressing response

01:12

to this kind of information So now atavus has his

01:16

own choice He could follow acosta He could end his

01:19

own life He could try to continue to service king

01:25

Or he could punish himself in some other way And

01:30

the decision he makes is quite interesting He takes the

01:33

broaches off of acosta's dress and these have pins behind

01:38

them And he uses those pins to gouge out his

01:42

eyes I's the chorus returns to the scene where obviously

01:46

shocked They want to know why he's done what he's

01:49

done And he explains that now that he knows the

01:53

truth there's nothing pleasant in the world for him to

01:56

see again Really really profoundly dark And now he has

02:01

to leave He exiles himself in a sense he becomes

02:05

a beggar for a while he asks his brother in

02:08

law creon han to take responsibilities for his two daughters

02:12

He's leaving behind Obviously he laments having been born into

02:17

such a cursed family having inflicted that curse on everyone

02:22

around And is that just pal historian that the story

02:26

ends with the greek chorus on stage again sort of

02:30

explaining to us in their own oblique way what has

02:34

happened They chant the maxim that no man should be

02:38

considered fortunate until he is dead So we do end

02:43

on this no more or less of helping this helplessness

02:47

and an inability to escape one's fate So what does

02:52

somebody reading this play or watching this play What are

02:55

we meant to Take away from it there's an easy

02:57

interpretation but this idea that you can't escape your own

03:02

fate i think there's more to it than that regardless

03:05

of what your fate is do have various options for

03:10

how to deal with it and what we've just been

03:12

presented with our a set of people who encounter a

03:17

set of crossroads literal and bigger it and you have

03:21

joe kostya and last who receive a prophecy and have

03:25

to decide what to do it You have a piss

03:29

later in his own life counter's men who want to

03:32

kill him and decide how to respond And you have

03:36

a piss later faced with what might be a sort

03:39

of really unfortunate and haunting truths about his life gets

03:44

to decide should he pursue them Should he try to

03:46

ignore them And you can see how making any of

03:51

these decisions might have a negative or unexpected resolved But

03:56

the fact is that people can choose what they're going

03:58

to dio right And i think that process that this

04:01

play walks us through What is edifice reasoning for blinding

04:07

himself Describe the maxim of the story how do themes 00:04:12.338 --> [endTime] like fate and crossroads come into play

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