In The Oedipus Trilogy, what are some examples of the theme of blindness in the plays and why did the author choose blindness as a theme?

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Subject is one of the most commonly misinterpreted literary terms. Subject refers to concrete content that exists in a work, such as death, blindness, and marriage, while theme, on the other hand, is a central idea or message of a work that is a universal truth expressed as a sentence. For example, people never see the truth until they throw off their blindness of bias and prejudice.

In The Oedipus Trilogy by Sophocles, blindness, and its derivative forms of words that deal with vision and sight, has been referred to by many critics as a metaphor for truth, honesty, knowledge, morality, and many others. The extensive list of references to Oedipus’s blindness, start with the ones connected with Oedipus’s “eyes” and the verb “to see” in the Prologue and in Oedipus’s dialogue with Teirisias in Scene 1. The reference then continues to lines 17, 25, 109 in the Prologue, and lines 84–104, 120, 129, 149, 153, 157, 187, 195–97, 200, 204, 215, 236–37, all simply in Scene 1.

Compare Teirisias, who is physically blind but can see the truth and foretell the future, with Oedipus, who is now deprived of his eyes but can see clearly only after he blinds himself. Such instances of ironic reversal suggest that self-knowledge and ignorance are intertwined in such a dramatic way that the discovery of the truth leads to self-destruction.

Oedipus’s self-inflicted punishment by blinding himself at the very moment he sees the truth about the fulfillment of Apollo’s prophesies may also represent the most ironic consequences of his moral blindness. One can note the extent of Oedipus’s tragic fate by linking his moral blindness with his inadvertent transgression of the moral codes of parricide and incest.