Antigone: A Tragedy

Why wouldn’t Antigone be a tragedy? It holds all of the main features to make it one. Evil, suffering that leads to death or loss and a hero who is spiritually crushed that is saved until the end to explain the moral of the play. It is amazing that there is always a way that you can think of how the whole story could have ended better or with a way which everyone would be happy, but that wouldn’t be a tragedy would it. From this definition of a tragedy, one can clearly see why Antigone is a complete illustration of one.

To begin with there is evil. Evil can be anything because it all depends on where one draws a line between acts of good and bad. The characteristic of evil is mostly seen in the ruler Creon.

The first thing that Creon did was take over after his father died because he wanted to be powerful and to raise his pride. However with this pride and power Creon didn’t have a care in the world and he didn’t think about any of his actions.

Without even realizing it he had accused Antigone for burying her brother when his ordinance was really unmoral. This is why he fits the characteristic of evil because he blamed Antigone for doing something that wasn’t wrong.

In addition, he sentenced her to death because of burying her brother and that is really unjust of him. Last of all, the fact that Antigone was going to be the wife of Creon’s son and he still sentenced her to death. He obviously wasn’t thinking of how his actions would affect other’s because his son loved Antigone. All in all, it is quite obvious why Creon was characterized evil in this tragedy.

The next event is suffering and death. Suffering can be defined as many things but agony and pain from loss but most of all suffering only causes more suffering because bad cannot bring out anything other than more bad until it stops at a death. Suffering is seen after Creon sentences Antigone to death because that is when everything starts to go downhill.

It was not only Antigone who was suffering all of the time because of loosing her family, it was also Creon’s son because his wife that he loved was sentenced to death so he killed himself which provided even more suffering. In a domino effect from the son’s death the mother killed herself because she couldn’t stand the loss of her son.

Which left Creon alone suffering because of his own decisions that he made to kill Antigone. Therefore, suffering eventually leads to death and is a factor that was included into this story.

The last factor for a tragedy is a hero. A hero in the end who is depressed because of what they could have done to actually save someone. The hero in Antigone is Creon again. The only reason why Creon is the hero is because at the end of Antigone he finally realizes that his law was against the gods’ wishes, so he tried to fix them by giving Antigone’s brother a proper burial. However, by holding a burial first, he gave Antigone time to kill herself.

If he had just saved Antigone first than the dominoes wouldn’t have fallen over at all. Everyone would have been save and lived happily ever after, but that is not how tragedies come to end. Finally, with all of the deaths that the want to be hero had caused, he was left with an empty world with no one left in his world that meant much to him.

In the end, all ended like a tragedy should. The audience learning a lesson. That one should think before he acts, and that sometimes moral laws come before ones set by man. Its astonishing that one could kill three people with just one mistake of not paying attention. Also the Prophet even told him that what he was doing was wrong, and he still didn’t fix it correctly.

If only he had thought things through than he wouldn’t have lost his son, his wife or his future daughter-in-law, Antigone. Therefore, evil, suffering with death and a desecrated hero are all exponents of Antigone that all turn it into a tragedy.