At first when I started thinking about how Oedipus Rex connected to my blog questions I thought it might be difficult to connect them. Oedipus does not create his own illusion. Then I realized that Oedipus was living an illusion that was not created by him. It was created by Fate.

This opens up a whole new side to my questions that I never thought about before. Oedipus doesn’t know that he killed his father and married his mother, at the beginning of this play. So in a way he is living in a skewed reality and he is not aware of this. When he discovers that he did commit those crimes he becomes a different man. He struggles to deal with the facts, or reality. There was a consequence for him when his world shifted from illusion to reality.

I like the idea that maybe Fate creates our illusions. Do we have control over what illusions we live? Teiresias says to Oedipus, “Bear your own fate, and I’ll bear mine. It is better so: trust what I say” (Lines 308-309). His advice is to keep living his illusion because it is better for Oedipus. Maybe it is better to not know whether you are living an illusion. Teiresias also says, “You mock my blindness, do you? But I say that you, with both your eyes, are blind: you can not see the wretchedness of your life…” (Lines 399-400). This also makes me wonder if a “dream world” is better to live in than reality.

This was my favorite image I found of Oedipus because it is a mask. A mask is a symbol that is used a lot to illustrate that there is depth to a character and maybe there is something they are trying to hide. The bandages over where the eyes would be and the blood were really powerful. The face behind the mask (reality) still affects the mask (the illusion). The blood is on the mask now, forever ruining the mask and that illusion. (Photo Credit - http://aplitandcomp.wikidot.com/oedipus-rex)

Big Blog Question

"There is no

Life I know

To compare with

Pure imagination

Living there

You'll be free

If you truly wish to be"

-"Pure Imagination" from Willy Wonka and

the Chocolate Factory

Everyone always told me that when I "grow up" I'm going to lose my imagination. They said that little kids always grow out of "make believe". Children will stop living in a world of "Pure Imagination".

At first I believed them. I lost interest in creating new places in my head and making up characters. I also watched my little sister "grow up' and noticed when she stopped asking me to play with her. I just sort of accepted this idea. After all that's what all the adults said. But the more I look around at the world and the people in it, this "fact" makes me want to laugh.

Teenagers and adults have not lost their imaginations. They just don't recognize how they are using it.

Sometimes we just can't handle the truth. We would rather put on a mask to hide our own personalities just to be included with the crowd. This leads me to wonder how far someone will go to skew reality and to create an illusion. Is it in human nature to do this as a way of protecting ourselves or is it something we create to satisfy our own personal desires?

Briony, a character from Atonement, took her illusions so far that she changed the lives of her sister and her sister's boyfriend forever. She let her imagination create a story and then used it to try to fix her mistakes. That also makes me question whether or not our illusions have consequences.

In Shakespeare's Othello, the villain Iago says "I am not what I am". I think we are all hiding something. We may show certain people certain parts of our lives but I don't think we ever reveal all our cards to anyone. We seem to take pieces of our own realities and then use our imaginations to fill in the rest. Do we even know the difference between the two anymore?