Blindness, in the literal sense, is the inability to perceive by sight, to see through one’s eyes. In literary usage, however, the term is also used as imagery, giving it an allegorical meaning; it may be referred to as the characters’ failure to relate events to their circumstances. Unlike literal blindness where the character cannot see, blindness as imagery portrays a lack of knowledge about something, resulting in misconceptions and misinterpretation of the events. Illustrating blindness as imagery, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Sophocle’s Oedipus reflect the confrontation of appearance and reality in society and the souls of these characters, bringing into question their inability or unwillingness to be enlightened.
The fact that many people are blinded in real life is reflected in drama, while Oedipus and his environment prove that it is difficult for them to establish the cause-and-effect links between the events, they can see only the surface of the events. Appearance is often deceptive, the outer form often contradicts the inner content. “Sophocles structures the play around the twin themes of appearance and reality, for which blindness and sight serve as dramatic metaphors” (Beer 99).
The plot of the work of drama is expected to be focused on showing the readers the mismatch between the outer form and inner content, the characters’ actions and their true intentions, the events, and the characters’ perception of reality. In the play Oedipus the King, Oedipus is at first portrayed as the wise person solving the sphinx’s riddle, saving Thebes and becoming its king. However, despite this ingenious show of wisdom and insight, Oedipus was blind, oblivious of his fate until the eleventh hour. “The blindness he had exhibited in his character eventually became physically manifest when he purged out his eyes” (Sophocles 110).
This event could be the final confirmation that he had been blind all his life, or a paradox, intentionally created by the author to contrast the physical and imagery senses of sight. It means that blindness is not only a physical defect but also the inability to interpret events correctly. In his response to the congregation sent to see him, Oedipus lamented: “Sick as you are, not one is sick as I, each of you suffers in himself…but my spirit Groans for the city, for myself, for you” (Sophocles 79). The sickness that Oedipus was referring to was the plague in Thebes, and he meant his tormented soul in search of a solution by his sickness.
However, the real illness was not the plague itself, but the murderer who had become the city’s king, thus infecting the whole city with his abomination. He could neither see that he was the cause of the sickness nor understand that his real sickness was his guilt for killing the king and committing incest. Being deprived of the ability for introspecting himself, Oedipus does not manage to see the causes of the evil inside of his soul, Sophocles shows to the readers his distorted picture of life and mismatch between the reality and his self-evaluation.
Shakespeare on the contrary focused on introspection as the way of cognition and thinking for his character. “The introspective Hamlet is also the hero who reveals the limitations of introspection, dramatizing powers of self-deception in the human mind to which a limit has yet to be found” (Grazia 165). It means that insufficiency of introspection as the method of cognition of the surrounding world is one of the key ideas of the play. His blindness to the facts is hinted at by Ophelia, when, after an awkward confrontation with a seemingly crazy Hamlet, she remarks that the prince “seems to find his way without his eyes” (Shakespeare 109).
On the surface, Hamlet is aware of other characters’ behaviors, but his obsession to use their overt behaviors to penetrate their souls, especially his desire to know the guilt in Claudius’s soul, makes him oblivious of the obvious facts. Despite his claim to depend on his ability to see and his acute awareness of other characters’ weakness, it becomes increasingly apparent that the eye by which he sees lies in his mind, rather than his two physical eyes.
Hamlet looks for the reasons for his father’s death, listening to the voices of his consciousness and the ghost of his father, and separates himself from the physical reality. It shows that he can see only what his mind imagines, and not the obvious facts and real events. Hamlets’ introspection as the only way of cognition of the surrounding world appears to be insufficient for the overall awareness and enlightenment of the character. Sophocles and Shakespeare intentionally limited their characters’ perspectives to show the possible causes of their imagery blindness.
Illuminating the theme of mental and spiritual blindness in society, the authors depicted the events and their characters in the ironical key, drawing interesting parallels and creating paradoxes. “Normally, physical sight is equated with knowledge and light and truth, darkness with their opposites, yet Teiresias, the blind prophet, sees what Oedipus, the sighted man, does not. When Oedipus finally sees, he blinds himself” (Smith 86).
Sophocles not only does not identify physical sight with cognition and awareness but even contrasts them and makes them mutually exclusive. To demonstrate Oedipus’s inability to notice the obvious things, the author creates a situation, in which the character and all people surrounding him do not understand that he is the murderer and the king at the same time. When the oracle declares that the evil living in Thebes must be expelled, Oedipus vows to see that the murderer is banished from the land.
The message from the oracle, “Drive the corruption from the land, don’t harbor it any longer, past all cure, don’t nurse it in your soil – root it out!” (Sophocles 110) is understood by Oedipus as directing him to hunt out the murderer and banish him. He says that “Be it mine to track them to their source….for he that slew him, whosoever he be, will I dispel this curse” (Sophocles 93). The message of the oracle meant that the citizens are to expel the king. Nonetheless, the whole city is not aware that evil is embodied in their ruler. This is shown by Creon when he tells Oedipus that “Our evil plight if all goes well, may end in highest good” (Sophocles 9).
The Sphinx says that the murderer is not to be sought far away from the city, demonstrating that blindness prevents people from thinking logically, while any hints or advice are useless. Answering Oedipus’s question about what prevented them from finding the murderer, Creon says that “The Sphinx, with her dark riddle, bade us look at nearer facts, and leave the dim obscure” (Sophocles 12).
This suggests that the people of Thebes were blind to the facts, and could not scrutinize themselves enough to identify the evil that had brought misfortune upon them. The dark riddle and the Sphinx symbolizing darkness and physical obstacle limiting the citizens’ horizons demonstrate the identification of physical and imagery blindness in the consciousness of the people. Aiming at enlightening the readers, Sophocles uses paradoxes and contrasts the concepts of physical and mental blindness in his play.
Focusing on the inner struggle in his character, Shakespeare makes Hamlet insane in some episodes to emphasize the insufficiency of introspection as his method of cognition, using paradoxes and reducing them to absurdity. In the case of Hamlet, it is rather paradoxical, for he is trapped in the conflict between his conscience and senses, for the former doubts what the latter perceives. For instance, he observes the ghost of his late father and hears the accusation it makes against King Claudius, but he is troubled with his conscience, uncertain whether he should believe the ghost, or, it is just a deception.
It is this lack of certain truth that compels him to plan for a visual test that would prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Claudius killed his father. The truth is that Claudius is thoroughly guilty, but Hamlet is blinded by his conscience.
The impact of the inner struggle on the behavior and decisions of the character is exaggerated, for this reason, Hamlet may seem insane. “The character Hamlet has come to symbolize a person whose thoughtful nature is an obstacle to quick and decisive action” (Hirsch 126). Making decisions, Hamlet gives preference to his thoughts and inner reasoning instead of analysis of the real events. Shakespeare separates his character from the real world, leaving him in the world of his conscience and numerous doubts. Broadening the gap between reality and the characters’ perception of it, using paradoxes and overstatements, the authors managed to show the maximized effect of the imagery blindness on the picture of life.
The characters’ inability to choose the right perspective is questionable. The willful blindness and disregard of certain facts are not to be excluded. Sometimes it is easier to hide behind the distorted perception of reality instead of meeting the challenges of real life. Concerning Sophocle’s character, Oedipus may be regarded as enlightened at the moment when he loses his physical sight. His indignation at the crime and the intentions to find the criminal seem to be sincere.
Oedipus takes pains for the triumph of justice; it is his blindness that prevents him from perceiving the realities of life as they are. The roots of Hamlet’s blindness are different. “It is possible that Shakespeare meant to mark, as strongly as he could, the hatred of a noble, honest nature for that complicity in crime which is the result of willful blindness and self-interested negligence” (Marshall 69). The intentional separation from the real world resulted in the character’s intensified introspection and distortion of his picture of life. In Hamlet, the idea of blindness is suggested at the beginning after the late king’s ghost appears.
When the other characters claim that it resembles the dead king, Horatio refuses to agree with them. He doubts what they are seeing as delusions, and says that he could only believe what he can see, that which can be verified “with the sensible and true avouch my own eyes” (Shakespeare 67). This statement by Horatio marks the beginning of the continued reference in the play to visual reality, i.e. perceiving with certainty, and Hamlet’s obsessive search for truth and knowledge about the death of his father. The image of blindness is achieved by his desire to watch King Claudius’s behavior to link his actions to his guilty conscience (of killing Hamlet’s father as claimed by the ghost).
Struggling with his conscience, the main character is assured that moral values are as important for the other characters as they are to him. Emphasizing visual verification of the inner struggle means some kind of Hamlets’ inner blindness, i.e. lack of intuition to discern situations, even though he was concentrated on introspection and was looking for the answers in his soul. However, unlike Oedipus who was blind to the circumstances under which Thebes was plagued, Hamlet was confronted with a truth that he was not willing to accept until he proved it beyond any doubt. The failure to see the truth from the beginning, and the fact that it takes him too long to establish it, suggests that he is blind to the obvious facts. Hamlet observes the events of the surrounding world, but cannot establish the cause-and-effect relations between them.
While he was quick to discern his mother’s hurried marriage to Claudius, he was too blind to link the incestuous marriage to Claudius’s scheming plans to take over the throne, which in itself could establish Claudius’s motive to kill King Hamlet. In this relation, Hamlet’s doubts demonstrate the author’s intention to emphasize the difficulty to accept the crime of the relative. Hamlet’s blindness and his distorted picture of life may be explained by his idealizing of the family relations and subconscious refusal of accepting the crime of his uncle.
The idea of blindness refers to the short-sightedness of characters and their inability to perceive truth and reality. They act in total ignorance of the consequences of their actions, not establishing the cause-and-effect relations. “In tragicomedies, this sort of blindness is the heroes’ tragic flaws which lead them to their doomed end” (Cahn 325). Concentrating on one of the methods of getting the picture of reality and disregarding other ways of gaining the information, Sophocle’s and Shakespeare’s characters are blinded and distort their perception of facts and events. Oedipus’s failure to foresee the implications of his fervent quest to weed out the murderer caused his fall.
His impulsive nature is one of the driving forces, causing his tragedy. He is doomed to failure since the moment he goes to consult the oracle about his birth. He fails to look inside of himself and separating himself from the surrounding world is concentrated on physical reality. On the contrary, Hamlet’s obsession with introspection made him disregard the obvious facts. Sophocle and Shakespeare made their characters vivid examples of imagery blindness, focusing on different causes of this blindness and the different nature of the distortion.
Works Cited
Beer, Josh. Sophocles and the Tragedy of Athenian Democracy. Praeger Publishers, 2004: 190.
Cahn, Victor L. The plays of Shakespeare: a thematic guide. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001: 346.
Grazia, Margreta. Hamlet without Hamlet. Cambridge University Press, 2007: 267.
Hirsch, Donald, Joseph Kett, James Trefil. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. Houghton Mifflin Company. 2002: 647.
Marshall, Frank Albert. A Study of Hamlet. Bibliolife, 2009: 216.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Prestwick House Inc., 2003: 304.
Smith, Helaine. Masterpieces of Classic Greek Drama. Greenwood Press, 2006: 217.
Sophocles. Oedipus Rex: (Oedipus the King). New York: Digireads. Publishing, 2005: 84.