King Oedipus can be taken as a
typical hero of classical tragedies. Aristotle, the first philosopher to
theorize the art of drama, obviously studied Oedipus and based his observation
about the qualities of a tragic hero upon the example of Oedipus. In Aristotle's
conception, a tragic hero is a distinguished person occupying a high position,
living in prosperous circumstances and falling into misfortune because of an
error in judgment. Aristotle used the word "hamartia" to indicate the
protagonist's tragic weakness.
According to Aristotelian precepts about tragedy, a tragic hero would be a man
of noticeable qualities of behavior, intelligent and powerful, but by no means
perfect. The fall of a totally saint like figure or a totally depraved rogue
would violate the moral expectation and the audience would think such fall
design less, chaotic and unjustifiable. Oedipus is neither a saint nor a rogue.
Despite his qualities, he falls because of his mistakes. His position is indeed
as frail as ours, and he fails like common men in one sense, and such frailty of
human position is what tragedy has to make us realize. In terms of the
Aristotelian theory of tragedy, Oedipus is a tragic hero because he is not
perfect, but has tragic flaws. Aristotle points out that Oedipus' tragic flaw is
excessive pride (hubris) and self-righteousness. He also points out certain
characteristics that determine as tragic hero. Using Oedipus as an ideal model,
Aristotle says that a tragic hero must be an important or influential man who
commits an error in judgment, and who must then suffer the consequences of his
actions.
Function of the tragic flaw: Tragic flaw is used for moral purposes in order to
encourage the audience to improve their characters and remove the flaws which
could bring their downfall in life. The readers and the audience can identify
themselves with the tragic hero, since it imparts feelings of pity and fear
among them thereby completing their catharsis or in other words, they are purged
of bad emotions. Therefore, they can learn a moral lesson so that they might not
indulge in similar actions in future.
Throughout the play many of the tragic flaws identified in the character of
Oedipus include pride, rashness, ambition, bad judgment, intellectual blindness,
anger, impetuosity, impiety etc. But what’s important to note is that Sophocles
made it very difficult to assign any single flaw to the downfall of Oedipus.
This is probably because a man dominated by a single vice is not better than
ordinary man—he is a man obsessed. Also the great tragic heroes couldn’t give
the illusion of being complete human beings if their falls could be fully
explained by any single vice.
Moreover he has made the tragic hero’s evil grow out of the situation not out of
himself. Sophocles has done this for evident reasons; the actions of a tragic
hero can’t be motivated by a vice, they must be motivated in a way that the
audience can accept it, and this means that he must have a reason, an excuse,
for what he does.
Thus the reason that Aristotle admired Oedipus the King so much is that the
protagonist's downfall is caused by his own actions. We are moved to fear and
pity at the end of the play not because Oedipus is sinful, but because he's
always tried to do the right thing in his own might. The terrible irony is that
his desire to do the right thing that brings about his destruction. When Oedipus
gouges out his eyes at the end of the play, he symbolically becomes the thing
he's always been: blind to the unknowable complexity of the universe.
Oedipus has long offered the classic example of tragedy. At first glance the
story seems to argue that we are all bound to an inescapable fate, a destiny
beyond our control, and that it is folly to try to escape it, but a deeper
reading reveals that it is the very same elements of Oedipus' personality that
have made him a hero to the people of Thebes that will ultimately lead to his
downfall; in other words, he has led himself to his own undoing.