Oedipus Journal 5

How does Sophocles evoke fear and pity in the reader/audience and what significance does this have?

Sophocles evokes fear and pity through the crowd with his use of syntax and with the readers knowledge. He plays around with this concept of having the reader fully understand and aware of what's going to happen within the story. In our minds the events are to be set up in chronological order, by birth to death. So Sophocles starts out by dropping the reader in the middle of an event, yet later on tells us about the past while other events were occuring. With that he throws event at as in a way that we know what would happen yet the characters doesn't, almost as if the reader wants to do something about it but is helpless. As some readers would say "I want to jump into the book/movie and talk to that character", whether out of anger or other feelings. This thought of unable to do anything makes do nothing more but to read on to see what the conclusion would be, how things turn out. Even though the reader may know, and when they read the truth they still feel as if why does this happen. So this structure of events create this tension that slowly builds up to how the reader slowly goes through these emotion changes.