Oedipus is blind from birth. His real parents, Laius and Jocasta, send him to be killed, but the shepherd asked to do this, instead gives him to another couple. After learning of the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, Oedipus flees to Thebes in an attempt to guarantee that the prophecy will never come true. In his flight he makes the fated mistake of killing a man who he later finds out is his real father. In Thebes, Oedipus solves the riddle of the Sphinx, becomes king, blind to the fact that he has kill

At the peak of his life, Oedipus was a hero. He rid the city of Thebes of an evil plague by solving the riddle of the Sphinx, and his followers loved him for it. Ironically though, through the many forms of blindness that Oedipus possessed, he brought an equally disastrous plague back to the same city he saved. He held himself higher than other men because of his riddle solving abilities, and with this self righteousness, further blinded himself to the truth. “..I came by, Oedipus the ignorant, I stopped the Sphinx!” (304) Oedipus, though sarcastic in calling himself ignorant, did not know how right he was. In the end, blindness indirectly cost Jocasta her life and more significantly made Oedipus what we know him as today; a tragic hero.

Oedipus possesses physical sight, but is completely blind to the truth. When a plague falls on Thebes and the only way to rid the city of it is to find the previous king’s killer, he calls upon a prophet named Teiresias, who ironically has no physical sight but sees the truth clearly.

ed the previous one, and marries Jocasta. Blind to his past and to the power of prophecies, Oedipus killed a man and married a woman that was the exact age to be his mother. Little did he know that this was not a mere coincidence.

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