Hi I am Beto and a new user. I am a student and I need someone to correct my essay please. Here it is:
What killed Oedipus?
Oedipus was known as the savior of Thebes, as the wise man, and as the last hope to save Thebes again. At the end of the play we can evidently see how Oedipus is in a downfall and his search for the answer to save Thebes is actually getting closer to the truth which will result in the last punch to get Oedipus down; but what really got him down? We can say it was fate, meaning it was meant to be. It is also possible to say that the society took him down, as happened to Jesus and Martin Luther King Jr., and many others fighters for freedom and great leaders. But it was not fate nor was society what took him down; instead it was his own nature what took him down, meaning his continuous search to find who he was.
Using logic to explain things is part of human nature. Humans need things to be explained logically for them to accept it. We can find this quality in the characters of the play, especially in Oedipus. He used logic to find the answer to the riddle of the Shrinx; and like any wise man would’ve done he used his logic, intelligence and wisdom to try to find out who killed Laios to eventually save Thebes. This is when we start to realize the downfall of Oedipus. He is using his own nature, the nature of intelligence, to explain the situation which doesn’t have a logic explanation. His continuous search is killing Thebes because no answer is found yet. While he is trying to save the city through logic and intelligence, the whole city is dying through intelligence and logic. The only thing his own nature is saving is his own nature by trusting it and not opposing from it.
This nature is creating a war zone inside Oedipus, turning him in both the savior and the destroyer. Oedipus story resembles how technology is actually destroying today’s world. We are trying to save this society and world by developing technology, but instead we are making it harder and tougher. It is necessary to know our limits and to stay within them. Humans are neither whole powerful nor perfects, and we still try to explain everything through logic and human intelligence. It is crucial that we understand that this nature of logically explaining everything is going to destroy us as it did to Oedipus. Logic is taking us apart from the pleasures that really fulfill us. If we keep looking for logic answers and explanation we will never love, we will never live friendship, and we will never find God. The urge to understand everything can lead to pain rather than joy. If rational explanations are unattainable the result will be self-destruction. The degree of this self-destruction is measured depending on the expectation for each individual. The expectations for Oedipus were so immense, so in result his self-destruction was immense too.
It wasn’t fate, and it wasn’t society, it was all his nature. He was full of ignorance but yet having to know and understand. His search for the logical explanation killed his people and killed him too. Oedipus was the only hope and the expectations were huge, so it was a necessity to know; he couldn’t live without knowing himself, yet he cannot live having found out. His ideas, decision and beliefs were all reign by logic, but still his life is qualified as illogical. Life is a long path edged by infinites falls on the sides. Each time we try to explain illogical things through logic we are getting closer to the edge since we get further away from the middle, which resembles the essences of life which are love, friendship, and God. Sophocles wrote this play to warn us about the misunderstanding of progress. Progress is not about developing technology or intelligence; progress is about centering ourselves in the path of life and let the essences lead our world. Like in the bible, in life there are mysteries and paradoxical events which don’t have a logical explanation. The hunt for these explanations will not save us but instead destroy us since we would never find an answer and as a result we walk away from them and get closer to the edge and eventually fall down. His own nature brought Oedipus and Thebes down; let us not make the same mistake.