Exploring the Nature of the Victim and the Pitied with Oedipus

               It seems as though it is nearly impossible to get through a story without encountering at least one character dealing with a crisis that leaves them in shambles. It is not the crisis, however, that makes this situation complex, it is how we as readers react to this character in distress. We often trace the story backwards, trying to find the time and place where they were wronged by something or someone else so we can make them out to be a victim. As we race into the past, we simultaneously become fixated on the present, witnessing the character’s anguish in a frozen frame and pitying them. In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, like most stories, these paired acts lead to a mystifying paradox, where we find ourselves stumbling as we attempt to traverse the blurred lines between victim and cause and just and unjust punishments. This paradox raises the question of the degree of connectedness between making a character out to be a victim and pitying them, and whether or not there could be a difference between these two acts. It is easy to become lost in the whirlwind of Oedipus’s terrible prophecy and his life-shattering discovery of it, so it is best to return to the words that Sophocles wrote to explore the nuances of victims and pity.

Different characters in the tragedy blame many different sources for Oediopus’s tragic fall. Jocasta claims that 

“It’s all chance, chance rules our lives” (lines 1070-1071), 

and Oedipus himself claims that he was 

“cursed in [his] birth” (line 1310). 

These little hints that the author scatters throughout the story grow in number and eventually serve as a trail of breadcrumbs the reader can use to find their way to the source of the issue when they encounter a character in an agonized state. Once this source has been located and approved of, the reader can label the downtrodden character a victim. This breadcrumb structure can be found in the poem Icarus by Edward Field. In this work, a trail of hints such as the 

“gray, respectable suit” (line 11) , “suburb” (line 18), “commuter trains” (line 28), and “various committees”(line 29)

seem to perfectly and linearly connect the root of Icarus’s defeat to mass culture and suburbia. 

This however, is not the whole story. Although the concept seems simple at first, there are many complications to this trail of crumbs. For example, what happens if there is more than one trail scattered amongst the words of the literary work? In the case of Icarus there most definitely is. Towards the end of the poem, we see Icarus becoming angry at himself for trying to fly to the 

“light fixture on the ceiling” (line 24). 

What is truly interesting about this second path to the perpetrator is that it leads us to Icarus himself. It is Icarus’s inability to detach himself from his past dreams that adds to his deep sorrow. In Oedipus the King, there is also more than one explanation for Oedipus’s downfall. As mentioned earlier, there are signs that fate and chance may have been the cause, but evidence such as Oedipus’s own choice to kill a man points towards Oedipus as the instigator. 

Despite the fact that Oedipus and characters like him carry at least some of the blame for their falls, we cannot help but feel bad for them. This is where yet another question arises: why do we feel bad for Oedipus? It cannot be because he is an innocent and preyed upon victim, because we have discovered that he does not completely fit this description. Again, we must look to the exact wording of the situation. At the peak of his pain, Oedipus cries, 

“my darkness, drowning, swirling around me crashing wave on wave” (lines 1451-1452).

 

 

These words are easy for any reader to relate to. They transport us to a time when we too felt like we may become swallowed by the bleakness of our troubles. In a similarly heart-wrenching scene from Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, young criminal Jimmy Blevins is taken behind an abandoned building and shot for his crimes. He may have deserved punishment, but McCarthy makes it hard to blame Jimmy in that moment, 

“...he limped away, looking back once mute and terrified” (page 177).

It is phrases like these that prompt the reader to look at a character out of the context of the novel and instead see him or her as a human soul or as a mirror and are designed to make a reader engage in pity. After all, according to Aristotle, the best tragic character is

“not preeminent in virtue and justice, and yet on the other hand does not fall into misfortune through vice or depravity, but falls because of some mistake”(Meyers page 1502). 

It is this humanness and complexity of characters that is created through loaded language that allow them to come out of a book’s pages and look us in the eye.

Now back to our driving question: is there a difference between deciding that a character is a victim and pitying them? The answer is both yes and no. On the surface, they may seem quite different. As explored before, when we attempt to make a character a victim we view them within the pages of the novel, and when we pity a character we examine the character in another dimension. Despite the fact that the first act is more logical and concrete and the second more emotional and abstract, both call on past experiences and personal concepts of good and evil in order to react to the character at hand. These two acts are also interconnected, since a character analysis is not complete without first examining both the concrete and abstract. So next time you analyze a character in peril, take a moment to enjoy the intriguing complexity of the acts you take part in.