Readers are attracted to moments of intensity in a writer’s work. By what means and with what effect have writers in your study offered heightened emotional moments designed to arrest the reader’s attention.
The main moment of intensity came when Oedipus sees Jocasta dead. “He rips off her brooches, the long gold pins holding her robes and […] he digs them down the socket of his eyes […]” (Sophocles 237). Oedipus takes pins and gouges his eyes with them. Sophocles uses imagery of this, “raking them down his eyes. And at each stroke blood spurts from the roots, splashing his beard, a swirl of it, nerves and clots-black hail of blood pulsing, gushing down” (Sophocles 237). This imagery creates a moment of intensity because the reader is uncomfortable. What Sophocles describes is very graphic and causes the stomach of the reader to churn a bit.
Oedipus hurts his eyes with the pins. Sophocles uses the motif of blindness in this passage as he does throughout the play. Originally, Oedipus was figuratively blind to his situation, but he did not realize it. Now that he knows the truth about his situation, he wants to be literally blind to it. “Blind from this hour on! Blind in the darkness-blind!” (Sophocles 237). If he cannot see it, it is not happening. He does not feel worthy of living with sight because of what he has done.
Another reason that this passage is a moment of intensity is because Oedipus is pretty seriously physically harming himself. This is not something that a person witnesses everyday so it is different and unknown to the reader. This causes the reader to pay more attention to it. It makes the reader question how a person could do something like destroying his/her own eyes and why a person would do that. When a reader questions something about a passage they are reading, they are automatically spending more time on and paying more attention to that passage.
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