Antigone Analysis - literary techniques

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Antigone Analysis


After hearing the final verdict of Antigone’s grim fate, Haemon calmly confronts his father Creon - giving the impression of being fully devoted and supportive of his father’s will and wisdom. A somewhat astonished Creon, praises Haemon’s reverence and acceptance for what seems like compliance to Antigone’s death. He then launches into a brief speech detailing his strong belief in misogynist rule and his deep disdain for traitors like Antigone. This speech proves an essential role to the play as it emphasizes Creon’s major flaws of ignorance and selfishness, while highlighting many themes like the abuse of power and law, which ultimately leads to his wretched punishment.

In this scene, Creon is portrayed as a very patriotic, yet stubborn ruler who cannot stand to be defied – let alone have the laws of the state be defied. He proclaims, “But whoever steps out of line, violates the laws… he’ll win no praise from me.” He starts the declarative sentence with the conjunction “But” – a contrast to the previous stanza where declarative sentences are started with personal pronouns, and imperative verbs. He uses this conjunction with the triple technique to emphasize not only his confidence in his beliefs, but also to emphasize how important he feels it is for the Thebans to win his “praise.” This self-absorbed thinking ultimately escalates his ego, where all his decisions are right – resulting in his failure to recognize that other forms of justice do exist.

Creon shows no respect for the divine law and mocks the king of gods – Zeus, in his speech. He starts by portraying Antigone in a vulnerable light to make it seem as though she is begging for help - to which Creon tells the people to “Let her cry for mercy.” Creon then continues to expand on the depiction of her weakness in the following clause: “sing her hymns to Zeus who defends… kindred blood,” as if it is a pathetic plea, a last call for any source of hope. To make his contempt feelings towards the gods more explicit, Creon goes on to claim: “if I bring up my own kin to be rebels, think what I’d suffer from the world at large,” which implies that Zeus intentionally raised his children to be rebels – as if Zeus does not think critically before he makes decisions, and does everything without fear of consequence, unlike himself who thinks “what [he’d] suffer.” In this example, we see that Creon is either delusional and fails to see that he, himself would be considered a rebel since he is Zeus’ “kindred blood,” or that Creon does not believe in gods, or does not consider himself to be related to Zeus, whereby he feels free to make a mockery out of Antigone’s beliefs. Taking into consideration the name Zeus – supposedly the king of gods, it should be noted that this speech contains one of the five times where Zeus is referenced in the entire play. The lack of mention of his name could be a reminder to suggest that the tragic events in the play do not occur as a result of divine intervention, but rather a result of human mistakes.

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Aside from Creon’s egotistical attitude and contempt towards the divine law, the audience can observe quite easily that Creon is a very commanding, and confident ruler. He starts his speech with an imperative verb followed by a colon, “Imagine it:” to command his audience to think likewise. To place further emphasis on Creon’s commanding personality, he uses anaphora to contrast the unfaithful citizen with the ideal leader (himself) with plenonasm and periphrasis: “His orders must be obeyed, large and small, right and wrong.” By using periphrasis, he stresses the degree to which he expects the law of the land ...

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