Waller
Michael Waller
M. Morris
Honors Red
9/8/03
The Legend of Oedipus in “Scars,” “On the Way to Delphi,” and “Myth”
In “Scars,” “On the Way to Delphi,” and “Myth,” the respective authors allude to Sophocles’ “The Legend of Oedipus” to demonstrate that realizations often contradict one’s preconceptions. In “Scars," Peter Meinke uses the extended metaphor of the Greek tragedy Oedipus to challenge the narrator’s idolatry for his father. As the narrator, "read the riddle of [his] father's body," he discovered the imperfections that his indomitable father embodied. “The longest [scar] bolted down from his elbow, finger-thick where the barbered wire plunged in… His tragic knuckles spoke wordless violence in demotic Greek.” (Comment on quote) During the baseball scene, the narrator accidentally harms his father in the jaw, "dropping my father like a murdered king." This scene parallels the myth Oedipus as he strikes down his father Laius unknowingly. The narrator finds himself with a shattered image of his father, which is not as he once perceived. The idealistic image of his father was replaced by scars representing the loss of innocence.