ow he feels for their distress (Sophocles 48): Poor children! You may be sure I know All that you longed for in your coming here. I know that you are deathly sick; and yet, Sick as you are, not one is as sick as I. Each of you suffers in himself alone His anguish, not another's; but my spirit Groans for the city, for myself, for you. Oedipus will not be deterred in his search for the truth, no matter who tries to persuade him to abandon the quest (Sophocles 64):Oedipus: Do you know anything about him, Lady? Is he the man we summoned? Is that the man this shepherd means? Jocasta: Why think of him? Forget this herdsman. Forget it all. This talk is a waste of time. Oedipus: How can you say that, when the clues to my birth are in my hands? Jocasta: For God's love, let us have no more questioning! Is your life nothing to you? My own is pain enough for me to bear. Oedipus: You need not worry. Suppose my mother a slave, and born of slaves: no baseness can touch you. Jocasta: Listen to me, I beg you: do not do this thing! Oedipus: I will not listen; the truth must be made known.Oedipus' conscious choice to pursue and accept his doom makes him a tragic figure. Bernard M. W. Knox, author of The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy, points out that the hero has to choose between his doom and an alternative "which if accepted would betray the hero's own conception of himself, his rights, hisduties," but in the end the hero "refuses to yield; he remains true to himself, to his physis, that 'nature' which he inherited from his parents and which is his identity." (Knox 106) Therefore, one can see Oedipus's unwavering insistence to uncover the truth about the murder of ...
