O Herói trágico em Édipo Rei de Sófocles

Abstract

This article aims to weave an appreciative analysis of the category of the tragic hero in the tragedy Oedipus Tyrant, by Sophocles. For this, fragments of this tragedy were examined, based on what Aristotle, in his Poetics, postulates as a characteristic of the tragic hero, comparing it with what Frye (2014) addresses in the essay entitled: historical criticism: Theory of modes, in which he presents this hero in the category of elevated mimetic mode, highlighted in relation to the human, but submissive to the environment. For a deeper view of this category, it is worth noting that Sophoclean tragedy begins with an intervention by the people to Oedipus, in view of the plague that ravages Thebes. And with the development of tragic praxis, the tyrant, in his good intentions, finds himself at the crossroads of circumstances that only link him to nefarious deeds. At that moment, the work focuses on the reflection of two acts considered execrable to the citizen of classical Greece: parricide – murder of one's own father, and incest – act of sexual copulation with a family member, which, in the case of Oedipus, becomes comes to fruition with the hero's marriage to his mother, Jocasta. It is these two points that support the ordering of actions – sýstasis ton pragmáton – whose link necessarily strengthens in the eagerness to discover the real reason for the evil generated in the city. The composition of the facts rests on the figure of Oedipus as a mediator of the relations between men and gods, as well as the centrality of the family curse. In order to succeed in this investigation, the starting point was a mapping of the actions that lead the hero to downfall; the scenes that confront the hero's high position with the stain managed by his existence were analyzed and the category of the tragic hero was allied with the theory of the modes that sustain the human character of Oedipus. The paths taken in this research follow a bibliographical and descriptive methodology.

Keywords: Greek tragedy. Oedipus Rex. Tragic hero. Mode Theory.