Antigone

Antigone is very much her father’s daughter, and she begins her play with the same swift decisiveness with which Oedipus began his. Within the first fifty lines, she is planning to defy Creon’s order and bury Polynices. Unlike her father, however, Antigone possesses a remarkable ability to remember the past. Whereas Oedipus defies Tiresias, the prophet who has helped him so many times, and whereas he seems almost to have forgotten his encounter with Laius at the three-way crossroads, Antigone begins her play by talking about the many griefs that her father handed down to his children. Because of her acute awareness of her own history, Antigone is much more dangerous than Oedipus, especially to Creon. Aware of the kind of fate her family has been allotted, Antigone feels she has nothing to lose. The thought of death at Creon’s hands that so terrifies Ismene does not even faze Antigone, who looks forward to the glory of dying for her brother. Yet even in her expression of this noble sentiment, we see the way in which Antigone continues to be haunted by the perversion that has destroyed her family. Speaking about being killed for burying Polynices, she says that she will lie with the one she loves, loved by him, and it is difficult not to hear at least the hint of sexual overtones, as though the self-destructive impulses of the Oedipus family always tend toward the incestuous.
Antigone draws attention to the difference between divine law and human law. More than any other character in the three plays, she casts serious doubt on Creon’s authority. When she points out that his edicts cannot override the will of the gods or the unshakable traditions of men, she places Creon’s edict against Polynices’ burial in a perspective that makes it seem shameful and ridiculous. Creon sees her words as merely a passionate, wild outburst, but he will ultimately be swayed by the words of Tiresias, which echo those of Antigone. It is important to note, however, that Antigone’s motivation for burying Polynices is more complicated than simply reverence for the dead or for tradition. She says that she would never have taken upon herself the responsibility of defying the edict for the sake of a husband or children, for husbands and children can be replaced; brothers, once the parents are dead, cannot. In Antigone we see a woman so in need of familial connection that she is desperate to maintain the connections she has even in death.
1. Discuss the role of the sentry in Antigone. How does this minor character affect our impressions of major characters, or of the play’s central conflict?
Answer for Study Question 1 >>
The sentry in Antigone is a messenger who clearly has no desire to tell his tale. The entire seventeen lines of the sentry’s opening speech, in which he must report Polynices’ burial to Creon, are devoted to trying not to speak. His fearful halting demonstrates that Creon is powerful and dangerous, ready to exercise his power on the most helpless—and pointless—of victims. Creon, of course, blames the sentry for burying Polynices, and the sentry complains about the dangers of rulers who judge poorly. The sentry is free to say such things at this point, because he has nothing to lose. His forthrightness offsets the ugly cruelty of Creon’s power and makes Creon seem like a petty dictator rather than a moral force to be reckoned with.
The sentry is lucky, for shortly after vowing never to return to Creon or Thebes, he enters triumphantly with Antigone, who has been caught in the act of reburying her brother’s body. Although he continues to be a comical character, with his second entrance the sentry becomes less sympathetic. He boasts incessantly about being involved in a situation he formerly wanted to avoid. Also, because he turns Antigone in, he seems more complicit with Creon’s power than outside of it—even though his inaction would likely have cost him his life. In response to Creon’s request for details, he launches into a long and detailed description not only of the arrest but of the reburial of the body, its physical decay, the dust storm the sentries endured, and the rites Antigone administered. The sentry seems to have become something like a police officer, fully aligned with Creon. He enables Antigone’s ultimate imprisonment and demise.

1.Antigone, in Greek legend, the daughter born of the unwittingly incestuous union of Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta. After her father blinded himself upon discovering that Jocasta was his mother and that, also unwittingly, he had slain his father, Antigone and her sister Ismene served as Oedipus’ guides, following him from Thebes into exile until his death near Athens. Returning to Thebes, they attempted to reconcile their quarreling brothers—Eteocles, who was defending the city and his crown, and Polyneices, who was attacking Thebes. Both brothers, however, were killed, and their uncle Creon became king. After performing an elaborate funeral service for Eteocles, he forbade the removal of the corpse of Polyneices, condemning it to lie unburied, declaring him to have been a traitor. Antigone, moved by love for her brother and convinced of the injustice of the command, buried Polyneices secretly. For that she was ordered by Creon to be executed and was immured in a cave, where she hanged herself. Her beloved, Haemon, son of Creon, committed suicide. According to another version of the story, Creon gave Antigone to Haemon to kill, but he secretly married her and they had a son. When this son went to Thebes to compete in athletic contests, Creon recognized him and put him to death, whereupon his parents committed suicide.