Creon: The True Tragic Hero of Antigone

Throughout history, the character of Antigone has been an inspiration for many groups rebelling against totalitarian governments, and rightfully so. Antigone is a heroine and a martyr who dies doing what she believes is correct and moral. Despite her death however, Antigone is not the most tragic character in Sophocles's play. That honor falls to Creon, King of Thebes and Antigone's primary foil and adversary. Because the story is told primarily from Antigone's perspective, it is easy to forget that Creon is the one who loses everything he holds dear. Sophocles wrote Antigone as a tragedy, but he made Creon, his villain, the truly tragic character of the play.
While it is a challenge to view Creon as a tragic hero because it is hard to feel empathy for him, when one takes a step from the text it becomes apparent that Creon exhibits all the characteristics of a tragic hero. He has a high societal status , indeed, as a king he occupies the highest status in the land. While he has not been king for long enough to entirely gain the admiration of the people, it is apparent that the chorus seems mostly supportive of his actions at the outset of the play. However, as with all tragic heroes, Creon has a tragic flaw. In his case, this flaw can be found in his stubbornness and rigidity in his views. While not exactly hubris, Creon's stubbornness leads directly to his undoing, whether it occurs when he is arguing with Antigone or yelling at his own son. Creon's fiery stubbornness occurs as early as Scene I, when he shouts at the Choragos for suggesting that the gods could have played a role in burying Polyneices, calling them a bunch of "doddering wrecks." And he holds on to his opinion through his argument with Tiresias in Scene V.
However, the true tragedy of the play occurs during Creon's condemnation of Antigone for burying her brother. As strongly as Antigone believes that burying Polyneices is the proper thing to do, Creon believes just as ardently that Antigone's brother was a traitor who should never receive a burial. This rigid belief is what undoes Creon in the long run. It is not that though Antigone's crime is truly that severe, it is more that Creon becomes set is his views and furious when someone, even his son's betrothed, goes against them. His frustration at Antigone's actions, combined with the excessive power that he possesses as king, causes him to treat Antigone in a way that antagonizes everyone in the play, most notably his own son as well as the citizens he claimed to always put first. In the end, Creon's tragedy is complete when he loses his son, his wife and the trust of the people, all due to a chain of events that he himself instigated. While it is easy to consider Antigone a tragic heroine and a martyr because she dies while Creon lives, Creon actually suffers far more because he is forced to live with the loss of everything that he held dear. Creon may not be the hero of Antigone, but his story is a tragic one and he ends the story praying for death, laid low at the mercy of fate and the gods. (545)

"Death cancels everything but the truth."

As I read through The Death of Ivan Illych, I was reminded of a proverb: "Death cancels everything but the truth." Up until the illness, Ivan Illych lives a life of materialistic insignificance, making large decisions in his life that are designed to please other people in his life rather than himself. As a result, at the outset of his illness he has exactly the sort of life that he thinks that he should have, with a well-paying job and an attractive wife. However, because he does not genuinely enjoy these things, his life is but a cold facsimile of an actual successful life, a house of cards ready to fall at a moment's notice. This is what the illness does to Ivan Illych, it challenges his notions about death and forces him to look beyond the materialistic confines of his life.
Ivan Illych's spiral towards death manages to be both justified and depressingly tragic. From the beginning, Tolstoy clearly feels disdain for the stock character that Ivan Illych represents, using an ironic narrative voice at several points in the story. Tolstoy establishes Illych as being an opportunistic sinner at the beginning of the book, and it is not until way later that the reader feels any pity for him. And yet, the reader does eventually feel pity for Ivan Illych as he nears death. It is not simply the fact that he is dying, it is the overwhelming sense that Ivan Illych has entirely wasted his life and that it is too late for him to do anything about it. Indeed, his inability to grasp this frustrates Ivan Illych at the beginning of his illness as he reflects on the idea that he should not be suffering because he believes he has lived a good life. Ivan Illych's discovery that "I have not lived as I ought to" sounds like a man who has lost everything that he thought he had. As his death draws, he cannot stand the presence of his wife and his friends have all but abandoned him, concerned only with how his death will affect their job status. The only thing Ivan Illych has to his credit is the reoccurring question, "why is this happening to me." For a man who thought he had everything only to be left with nothing, this must be a very depressing question.
In many ways, Ivan Illych's death is the most meaningful aspect of his life. It is only after he has lost everything that he once cherished (his all-important status symbols) and embraced the idea that "it was not all the right thing," that he is able to die in peace. It took Ivan Illych a lifetime to realize that doing what society expected of him does not lead to happiness, but this realization was the crown jewel of his life, and it gave more genuine meaning to his final moments than all the moments that came before in his life.