Themes In Antigone

The play Antigonê by Sophocles is one of literatures’ great rebel stories about a woman that goes against an unfair king and a society that considers her gender inferior. It is a story of a tragic character of noble birth (Theban King Creon) that suffers an anguished descent from life and power basically on account of his pride. Antigonê, who is King Creon’s niece and future daughter-in-law, defies King Creon’s directive to not bury her brother Polyneices. King Creon declared that Polyneices be disgraced and not blessed by the holy ritual, and ordered him to lay unburied to rot on the battlefield as a traitor, to become food for the animals. Antigonê argues unflinchingly with Creon about the morality of his declaration and that Creon is disobeying the laws of the gods. She defied him by pouring dust over her brother’s body and completing the burial ritual to fulfill her duty to …show more content…
In Antigonê, Sophocles describes the type of pride that allows men to create laws that substitute for divine principles. Antigonê threatened the status quo, at stake was not only the order of the state, but Creon’s pride and sense of himself as a king and more fundamentally, a man. Antigonê plunged ahead purely on self-belief and her firm convictions of right and wrong. The conflict themes between the state and the individual, between man and woman, between young and old, between conscience and law, and between divine law and moral or human law, are all themes that continue to plague our society today. Creon believed that the greatest evil that society faces is rebelliousness and disloyalty and that, combined with the belief at the time that men were far superior to woman, seemed to force the inevitable self-injury and suicide that were universally prevalent among the main characters of the story. King Creon’s stubborn arrogance and pride cost him everything in his life that was dear to him