Oedipus Rex: A Comedy of Errors (and Eyes)

At the tender yet somehow precocious age of thirteen—thirteen going on forty, that is—my formative years were spent with my nose buried in the margins of a Latin textbook, tracing the myths of Apollo and Dionysus. I told myself I was learning history. In truth, I was learning something far older: how humans relentlessly insist on self-destruction.

Books were my constant companions, and in their knowledge-laden solace, I preferred the ancients—Plutarch, Ovid, Homer—who dared to make the gods at once cruel and borderline ridiculous. I only recently realised that Sophocles, too, had something to teach me—about humans, rather than gods.

Essentially, Greek tragedian Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex tells the story of a man (Oedipus Rex) who tries, with all his might, to outwit fate—only to collide with it head-on, and with almost hilarious tragicomic timing. Destiny, it seems, has a wicked sense of irony... and a flair for the theatrical. The prophecy is clear: he will kill his father and sleep with his mother. Yet, in his efforts to escape it, Oedipus unwittingly becomes the architect of his own doom—killing his father, marrying his mother, and, in a final surge of tragic irony, blinding himself. It is a masterclass in how stubborn curiosity and denial can transform life into a cosmic joke you never saw coming.

I first encountered Oedipus through Sigmund Freud. While reading The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), the Austrian neurologist gave me a crash course on the legend of King Oedipus and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Freud wrote, and I quote, “The Oedipus Rex is a tragedy of fate; its tragic effect depends on the conflict between the all-powerful will of the gods and the vain efforts of human beings threatened with disaster; resignation to the divine will, and the perception of one's own impotence is the lesson which the deeply moved spectator is supposed to learn from the tragedy.” I was enthralled—captivated, even—and suddenly, I wanted nothing more than to meet Oedipus himself.

Reading Sophocles felt like discovering an old, cruel joke I’d been taught to grieve instead of laugh at. The prophecy, the family tragedy, the self-inflicted blinding—it was all classical, and yet somehow, I found myself laughing more than I wept.

I personally feel like the broader facet that made the plot of this play funnier than Sophocles probably ever intended was the irony—the sardonic humour lurking beneath the tragedy. The ultimate irony lies in Oedipus himself, who, contrary to Freud’s definition of the Oedipus complex—“the hidden, yet intense, desire for a sexual relation with one’s own mother”—gouges his eyes out the very moment he realises he has slept with his mother.

Another layer of irony lies in the very premise: the more you try to outrun your destiny, the faster it catches up. Dramatic irony dominates the play from start to finish—we, the audience, already know the prophecy. Every desperate attempt Oedipus makes to escape it only drives him closer to its fulfilment, despite warnings from oracles and even Jocasta, his own mother.

Come to think of it, what had me chuckling while reading the play—and then erupting into full-blown laughter afterwards—was how ridiculously simple it would have been for Oedipus to sidestep his fate. All he had to do was avoid killing or marrying anyone older than him, and the prophecy would have stayed unfulfilled. The real trouble started when he fled Corinth, but disaster truly struck when Oedipus, like any “rational” man, succumbed to ancient Greek road rage, slaughtering an entire procession simply because Laius’s chariot driver told him to step aside. Now, this was a time when murder was not only overlooked but, in some sense, socially condoned. Still, it mattered because he ended up killing Laius, the King of Thebes, who, inconveniently, was his birth father, unbeknownst to him. And so, thanks to ill-timed fury and random slaughter, Oedipus unwittingly sleeps with his mother. Tragic? Absolutely. Hilarious? Perhaps, at least when one finds the humour in the well-crafted cruelty of irony.

Now, if that prophecy had been mine, I’d have taken a vow of celibacy and pledged myself to pacifism—just to be safe.

Nevertheless, on a more serious note, I was drawn to this play and resolved not only to pick it up but to finish it, because it seemed to mirror my own view of human folly and the inescapability of fate. 

Fate—or, as my religion, culture, and upbringing in Islam call it, تقدیر (taqdeer)—is, at its core, inevitable. It is the Divine decree, predestination, destiny—whatever term you choose, the truth remains the same: you cannot escape it. What is meant to be, what is written for you, will find its way to you, and in this lifetime, you will inevitably collide with it.

This is mirrored perfectly in Oedipus’s story, where even the initial riddle foreshadows the inescapability of his fate. When Oedipus encounters the Sphinx guarding the seven-gated Thebes, the riddle it poses is, in essence, a reflection of Oedipus himself: born crawling on all fours, walking upright on two feet as a man, and finally, blind, relying on a cane. It is the living answer to the Sphinx’s riddle: “What walks on four in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?” A cruel reminder that fate cannot be eluded.

I grew up with my babba, my eldest uncle, constantly warning me not to meddle with my taqdeer. He would tell me never to make choices based on mere guesses of what the future might hold. I was not to tempt fate or let the uncertainty of tomorrow dictate the decisions of today—if that makes any sense.

“It will never be possible for you to outwit what’s already written, Kittu,” he’d say. I never realised it then, but he was teaching me the moral of Oedipus Rex long before I ever opened the play. Because really, what is Oedipus’s tragedy if not the world’s oldest case of a self-fulfilling prophecy? The more he tries to flee fate, the faster he runs straight into its arms. Looking back now, I suppose my babba’s advice could’ve saved an entire Greek kingdom. Because, forget me—if there’s one man who tempted fate harder than anyone, it’s Oedipus: the poor soul who could solve every riddle but his own.

And perhaps that is where Sophocles’ true brilliance lies, not merely in the grand fatalism of his plot, but in how his characters enact it. What delighted me most were their dialogues—steeped in irony and often slipping into unintentional comedy. I came to realise that this is what turns what should have been a tragedy of tears into something bordering on satire. What truly captured my admiration for Oedipus Rex were the people trapped within the prophecy itself—their misplaced confidence, their absurd rationalisations, their unintentionally theatrical despair. Each line of dialogue felt like witnessing human ego stumble over its own logic. And Oedipus, with all his intelligence and determination, is perhaps the greatest spectacle of all: the harder he struggles to assert control & dominance, the more spectacularly he fails.

Personally, more than the king himself, I absolutely adored the characterisations of Creon and Tiresias. Sophocles really sprinkled a touch of highbrow sass into this divine tragedy with them. 

Tiresias, with his Greek-tragedy-grade sarcasm, reluctantly reveals to Oedipus that he himself is Laius’s murderer. But of course, Oedipus—too arrogant for his own good—denies it, insisting that the blind prophet who can literally see the future is somehow plotting against him. And Tiresias, ever unbothered, replies with a deadpan, “If you think this is a good idea, you’re blinder than I am.” Absolute comedic gold.

Tiresias is probably my favourite character in all of Greek mythology—not just because of his undeniably cool backstory, where he was transformed into a woman for several years and simply rolled with it. Still, because his role in almost every story he appears in (The Bacchae, Oedipus Rex, Antigone, The Odyssey) follows the same brilliant pattern: he tells the protagonist something they don’t want to hear, gets completely ignored, and then leaves. And honestly, you can hear how utterly done he is with everyone in his lines—it’s fantastic. I relate to that kind of delivery—the sardonic, “I know something you don’t” sort of wit, untouched by arrogance or malice. Tiresias isn’t cruel; he’s just tired of being right. No one listens, yet he still does his duty, as any oracle must. After all, in those days, oracles were as close to gods as mortals could get. They were vessels of divine truth, doomed to be ignored.

If Tiresias embodies the exhaustion of divine insight, then Creon is its bureaucratic reflection—a man forever tasked with tidying up the gods’ chaos with nothing but a sigh and a sense of duty. Merely a messenger, yet perpetually entangled in royal and divine idiocy, he never signed up for. Both share the curse of being dragged into disasters not of their making, but while Tiresias responds with weary sarcasm, Creon’s weapon of choice is deadpan diplomacy; he’s the living personification of “I have a job, not a death wish.”

Creon is considered a constant yet crucial presence in the play—separate from the citizens of Thebes, detached, and drowning in that secretive, businesslike air of a politician. Yet, to me, he's more like the ancient embodiment of “leave me out of this mess.” His demeanour stands in stark contrast to Oedipus’s flair for public dramatics; where Oedipus insists on airing everything before the crowd, Creon would clearly rather file a report and go home. He’s known to be a master of manipulation, yet most of the time he’s just… there—managing civic affairs, doing his nine-to-five in Thebes, when suddenly he’s roped into catastrophe.

The poor man barely returns from Delphi with a divine memo on how to end the plague when Oedipus starts interrogating him like he's a crime suspect, accusing Creon of wanting to overthrow him. And Creon’s essentially standing there like, “I literally just came here to deliver the message, I don’t even want your throne—being the King's brother-in-law is good enough for me.” It’s hysterical, really, like watching someone get dragged into workplace drama they didn’t even know existed. Where Creon is calm, factual, and diplomatic, Oedipus is riddled to the marrow with paranoia; together, they form the perfect tragicomedy of the pragmatic man versus the paranoid maniac. It’s dry humour at its finest, born purely out of exasperation.

There are multiple cosmic jokes in Oedipus Rex: Oedipus fulfilling his prophecy, embodying the sphinx’s riddle, and Tiresias being so uncannily right that his deadpan becomes literal truth when Oedipus blinds himself. But the ultimate cosmic joke, the pièce de résistance of divine irony, has to be Creon. By the end, after Oedipus has blinded himself, Creon inherits the throne—the very thing he spent the entire play insisting he didn’t want. He avoided power at every turn, yet it tripped and fell into his lap anyway. It’s subtle meta-humour: even the rational, pragmatic men cannot escape fate. The gods are cruelly amused, and Creon’s life is the punchline.

“Exactly what you run from, you end up chasing,” my father always says. He picked up the idea from the pseudoscientific law of attraction—a theory he introduced to me when I was eleven, that thoughts become things. By the time I entered middle school, he had me reading "The Secret" by Rhonda Byrne. The concept applies perfectly to both Creon and Oedipus: Creon spends the play running from the responsibilities of the throne, only to end up king anyway, while Oedipus stubbornly flees his prophecy, only to run straight into it. Fate, it seems, has impeccable timing and a wicked sense of humour.

Ultimately, Oedipus Rex isn’t just a play about fate—it’s a reflection of my own fascination with human stubbornness, curiosity, and absurdity. It doesn’t answer all my questions: why must fate be so cruel? Some say we can write our own destiny, but how does one alter what is already written? 

Still, the play taught me that even the wisest, most careful among us can stumble spectacularly into our own doom, often while convinced we’re avoiding it. And in that spectacle lies its unintentional hilarity, which somehow makes the seriousness with which we perceive fate a little lighter, if only for a moment. Creon, Tiresias, and even Oedipus himself become collaborators in this ancient joke, each reminding me that wisdom, reason, and morality often bow to circumstance and irony. 

Reading Sophocles now, at the age of nineteen, I realise that the classics endure not merely for their moral lessons or tragic plots, but because they invite us to see ourselves in all our absurdity, to laugh at it, and occasionally to wonder if the universe is somehow in on the joke. Perhaps this is why I will always return to Greek literature: for the correlation between destiny and folly, the beauty of language, and the rare, exquisite pleasure of seeing human seriousness collide with divine humour. And that, funny, tragic, inevitable, is a lesson I suspect Oedipus himself might begrudgingly approve.

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Glossary:

Impotence - inability to take effective action; helplessness.

Dramatic irony - a literary and theatrical device where the audience knows something crucial that a character does not.

Prophecy - a prediction of what will happen in the future.

Unbeknownst - without the knowledge of (someone).

Fatalism - the belief that all events are predetermined and therefore inevitable.

Highbrow - intellectual or rarefied in taste.

Bureaucratic - relating to a system of government in which most of the important decisions are taken by state officials rather than by elected representatives.

Pragmatic - dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations.

Pièce de résistance - (especially with reference to creative work) the most important or remarkable feature.

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