The Need for Attention

In the play Antigone, Sophocles uses overly dramatic characters to take the play from a small rebellion against authority to a tragic ending where only one miserable character remains alive. The entirety of the play could be summed up in the last four lines, when the Choragos says, “There is no happiness where there is no wisdom; / No wisdom but in submission to the gods. / Big words are always punished, / And proud men in old age learn to be wise” (139-42). Many or all of the deaths, however, could have been avoided if only certain characters had not been so blinded by their pride. However, the character that struck me as the most self-centered, the one who could have avoided a drastic amount of damage had she only been less intent to flaunt her good deeds, was Antigone.

Antigone starts the show as a martyr. Though her motives, her want to free her dead brother’s soul, are noble, her manner of doing so makes her seem selfish and in need of attention. In the opening scene, she asks her little sister Ismene to help her bury their dead brother, Polyneices. When her sister expresses her fear of breaking Creon’s law to do so, Antigone responds by viciously attacking her sister, saying, “You may do ask you like, / Since apparently the laws of the gods mean nothing to you” (60-1). According to Christianity, the greatest deed is one that goes unnoticed and is not bragged about by the doer. Right from the start, Antigone flaunts her will to bury her brother and risk execution, even telling her sister, “O tell it! Tell everyone! / Think how they’ll hate you when it all comes out” (69-70). Rather than acting out of pure love, she wants the world to know how courageous she has been for the sake of her brother. After she has been caught and sentenced to death, she still brags about what she has done for her brother, refusing to let Ismene accept any of the guilt. She seems less interested in the idea of commemorating her brother and more in love with the idea of death and pity. When confronting Creon and her sister, she repeatedly says phrases such as, “I belong to Death” (147), as if she needs to remind everyone how brave she has been to bury her brother and face her own premature death. When being led to her cave to die in isolation, she tells those around her, “Look upon me, friends, and pity me / Turning back at the night’s edge to say / Good-by to the sun that shines for me no longer; / Now sleepy Death / Summons me down to Acheron, that cold shore: / There is no bridesong there, nor any music” (5-10). While we can respect Antigone for her desire to honor her brother’s memory and not watch his corpse be devoured by scavenging animals, her need for sympathy, honor, and pretty much any form of attention turns her into a very unlikable character. Had she been more humble, she might have given the readers more of the feeling that she was burying her brother for his sake and not her own.