Essay Prompts for Friday, October 16th

Here are a pair of prompts for Friday. You may take your choice of either:

According to critic Northrop Frye, “Tragic heroes are so much the highest points in their human landscape that they seem the inevitable conductors of the power about them, great trees more likely to be struck by lightning than a clump of grass. Conductors may of course be instruments as well as victims of the divine lightning. Show how Oedipus, as a tragic hero, functions as an instrument of the suffering of others as well as himself and how this suffering contributes to the tragic vision of the work as a whole.

Over the entrance to the temple at Delphi are inscribed these words: “Know thyself.” Defend the statement that Oedipus is a classic example of the man whose central problem is that he does not know himself.

The ground rules are these: you may use as resources the text any notes you've made, and any or all of the critical essays we've studied. If you wish to use the time before Friday to outline an essay, by all means do so.

A word of warning: use only the resources you need—don't clutter your mind with too much stuff. The play itself is the one essential source.