Suicide has been a recurring human tragedy for as long as human affairs have been recorded. The principal suicide in Antigone does not at first pass seem relevant to the twentieth century, as it arises in the context of a judicial death penalty in a despotic state.
It expresses a devotion to certain ideals focused on her religion and family and shows many of the cardinal danger signs for imminent suicide. For that reason any lessons we can learn about suicide from Antigone are timeless and should be writ large in our understanding of its terrible grip on us.
First, Antigone is deeply committed to her religious beliefs and the dealings between her family and the Gods mean that she inhabits a world in which suicide has meanings that obscure its awful finality and tragic waste. Second she is a young woman who has lost all that she really holds dear in her life.
She is uprooted in her own home city, alone, can see no future for herself, takes no pleasure in her present life, is grieving terribly, and has lost the myths and meanings from which she might weave a fabric of value to sustain her in the face of the challenges that beset her. In the full flush of youth, she feels things intensely and lacks the experience of life that would otherwise equip her to deal with her emotional traumata.
These are all familiar factors to those who deal with suicide as part of their clinical life and they set off alarm bells. Thus Antigone allows us to explore, in the variety of suicides with which it deals, motifs with enduring relevance and forces that rend the fabric of our collective human soul in ways that are sometimes overlooked in medical literature.
Philosophical suicide is often a simple affair: an individual takes a rational decision that the value of life is outweighed by pain and distress and decides to end it all.
But the social and clinical picture is not nearly as straightforward. The phenomenon of political suicide is increasingly part of our news in various parts of the world. They have been quietly loyal to Oedipus and his sons; they should remain so now under Creon. The chorus, according to Antigone, are afraid to express their opinion on this decision, but perhaps it is not in their interest to do so either. Their elliptical and ambiguous utterances are nonetheless revealing.
Tyrants have on occasion employed great intellects to effect and justify their crimes. The Communist regime that persecuted Sharansky, among many other and worse enormities, has had, and continues to have, many erudite and eloquent apologists.
The same was true of the Nazis. German universities and German intellectuals, who had been at the forefront of so much academic and scientific progress in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, willingly consented to and participated in the crimes of the Third Reich.
Of course, one must also concede that many German academics did flee abroad, but as the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, who himself opted to become a British subject in , noted it is remarkable how few of these were not Jews or members of other persecuted minorities. Only a disinterested desire for truth will prevent this corruption and manipulation of the human mind. Without it nothing matters but power.
Perhaps one of the most important arguments for the existence and importance of objective truth was made by the philosopher Socrates — BC , a younger contemporary of Sophocles — BC. The search for truth mattered more to Socrates than personal interests or feelings and, like Antigone, he was prepared to die rather than consent to deceit or injustice. Entitled Aaliyah After Antigone , it shows two office cleaners challenging authority when they find their brother is being deported to Bangladesh by a recognisably vicious home secretary.
Before culture warriors start fulminating about desecration of a classic, one should point out that Antigone has always been open to adaptation. Jean Anouilh did a famous version, staged in occupied Paris in , in which the heroine became a symbol of the resistance. All that raises an obvious question: why is it that this particular play has acquired such mythic status and encouraged so many rewrites?
But this is also a play that raises fundamental questions about the conflict between civil and religious law, political expediency and common humanity. BookRags, Antigone. Structure of Antigone. They claim that the gods rightfully punished such arrogant boasts and hatred between the two men, and that they really got what was genuinely coming to them.
Pages , Lines He then states that any person who tries to give the body a burial will be punished by death. He assigns men to guard the body to make sure no one touches it. However, a sandstorm blows dust around and Antigone performs the proper burial rights for her brother.
A watchman then goes and tells Creon, who is enraged. They sing about how man is cunning and deceitful, and how justice will prevail among those who do wrong. Ismene then shows up and states that she helped Antigone, but Antigone states that her sister did not help at all and that it was all her fault.
Creon tells his men to lock the girls up and make sure they do not get away. Pages 28, Lines They sing about how such punishment will arise from such a little thing, the spreading of a thin layer of dust over the body of Polyneices.
The chorus then declares that there is no escape from imminent disaster. Creon claims that Haemon is blinded by love and must see that the law is more powerful. Creon then states that he is going to take Antigone to a cave and bury her alive so she can starve.
Haemon then states the he is not going to be around Antigone when she is killed and runs off. How love conquers all battles and how it prevails over everything. Then they weep over the fate of Antigone and how she will never be the bride of Haemon.
Creon then states that he has no mercy, and leads her to her doom. They then reflect upon how her brothers too, were of noble blood and how their deaths were so miserable. He tells Creon that his punishment for not giving a proper burial will be the life of his son. Creon believes that the prophet is mocking him and disregards his warning.
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