The Detective Who Is Hunting Himself: Why Oedipus Can’t Stop Asking Questions

A plague is destroying the city. Crops are failing, livestock are dying, women are losing their children, and the people have gathered before the palace to beg their king for help. The oracle at Delphi has supplied a clue: the pollution afflicting Thebes will end when the murderer of Laius, the city’s former king, is found and punished.

There has been a murder. The criminal has escaped justice. Witnesses must be questioned. Old evidence must be reconsidered.

And Oedipus intends to solve the case.

Read this way, one of the oldest surviving Greek tragedies begins to look surprisingly like a detective story. Sophocles wrote Oedipus the King more than two thousand years before Edgar Allan Poe created C. Auguste Dupin and helped establish the modern detective tale. Yet many of the pleasures of detective fiction are already here: an unsolved crime, contradictory testimony, a reluctant witness, a missing survivor, a series of clues whose significance becomes apparent only gradually, and an investigator determined to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

There is, however, one rather important difference.

The detective is hunting himself.

Oedipus is exactly the person the citizens of Thebes would expect to solve a mystery.

He has done it before.

Years earlier, the Sphinx terrorized Thebes by posing a riddle no one could answer. Oedipus supplied the answer, defeated the monster, saved the city, married its widowed queen Jocasta, and became king.

That history matters. Oedipus does not merely think he is clever. He has spectacular evidence that he is.

So when another crisis threatens Thebes, Oedipus approaches it in much the same way. There is a problem. The problem has an answer. The answer can be discovered through intelligence and determined action.

Before the citizens even finish asking for his help, Oedipus has sent Jocasta’s brother Creon to consult the oracle at Delphi. When Creon returns with Apollo’s command to find Laius’s killer, Oedipus immediately begins an investigation.

This is one reason it is too easy simply to describe Oedipus as arrogant. He certainly possesses enormous confidence, and Sophocles gives us plenty of opportunities to question it. But confidence has served Oedipus remarkably well. The same man whose certainty will become dangerous is the man who once saved Thebes because he was willing to think when everyone else was helpless.

His greatest weakness and his greatest strength may not be two different things.

Oedipus’s investigation quickly produces a familiar feature of detective stories: the uncooperative witness.

The blind prophet Teiresias knows who killed Laius. He also knows what will happen if Oedipus learns the answer.

So he refuses to tell him.

That refusal infuriates Oedipus. From his perspective, the prophet is withholding information while an entire city suffers. He presses harder. Teiresias resists. Oedipus accuses him of complicity in the murder.

Finally, Teiresias tells him what he knows.

Oedipus himself is the man he is looking for.

For the audience, the accusation is not a solution to the mystery. Most ancient spectators already knew the story of Oedipus. Sophocles is not trying to surprise them with the identity of Laius’s killer.

For Oedipus, however, Teiresias’s accusation is preposterous.

And that creates one of the play’s most interesting effects. We know Teiresias is telling the truth, but we can also understand why Oedipus does not believe him.

Oedipus knows that he did not deliberately murder the king of Thebes. He believes his father was Polybus, king of Corinth, who was alive when Oedipus left home. He has no idea that the stranger he once killed in an encounter on the road was Laius. He has built an entire understanding of his own life around facts that seem perfectly secure.

The trouble is that some of those facts are wrong.

A good detective follows evidence even when it overturns an attractive theory.

Oedipus does exactly that.

At first he looks outward. Perhaps Teiresias is lying. Perhaps Creon is plotting against him. Perhaps the accusation is part of an attempt to seize the throne.

Then Jocasta tries to reassure him.

Prophecies, she says in effect, cannot be trusted. Long ago an oracle foretold that Laius would be killed by his own son. But that never happened. Their infant son was abandoned and died, while Laius was reportedly killed by strangers at a place where three roads met.

Jocasta intends this story to prove that prophecy is unreliable.

Instead, she gives Oedipus a new clue.

He once killed a man at a crossroads.

Suddenly the investigation changes direction.

Oedipus begins asking questions about Laius: What did he look like? How old was he? How many men were traveling with him? Where exactly did the killing occur?

The answers are increasingly disturbing.

For the first time, Oedipus begins to consider seriously that he might have killed Laius.

But even now there is a possible escape. The original account said Laius had been attacked by several robbers. Oedipus remembers acting alone. If the surviving witness confirms that several men committed the murder, perhaps Oedipus is innocent after all.

So he sends for the witness.

The detective has now become a suspect in his own investigation.

And still he does not stop.

This may be the most remarkable thing about Oedipus.

As the truth draws nearer, other people begin trying to prevent him from discovering it.

Jocasta understands before he does. What began as an effort to reassure her husband has revealed something horrifying. She begs Oedipus to abandon his questions.

He refuses.

A messenger arrives from Corinth with apparently wonderful news: Polybus, the man Oedipus believes to be his father, has died naturally. Surely this proves that the prophecy was false. Oedipus did not kill his father.

But another part of the prophecy still troubles him—the prediction that he will marry his mother.

The messenger tries to relieve that fear by revealing another fact. Polybus and his wife were not Oedipus’s biological parents. The messenger himself received the infant Oedipus years earlier from a Theban shepherd.

Another clue.

Another witness.

Oedipus wants the shepherd brought before him.

Jocasta now knows exactly where the investigation is going. She makes one final attempt to stop him.

Oedipus continues.

There is something almost terrible about the reversal Sophocles has constructed. At the beginning of the play, Oedipus must force other people to help him uncover the truth. By the end, other people must try to protect him from it.

The man who once solved the riddle of the Sphinx cannot leave a riddle unsolved—even when the answer is himself.

The Sphinx’s riddle asks about a human being.

What creature, it famously asks, goes on four legs in the morning, two at midday, and three in the evening?

Oedipus knows the answer: a human being, who crawls as an infant, walks upright as an adult, and uses a stick in old age.

It is an elegant piece of mythology because the man who can answer a general question about humanity proves disastrously unable to answer the most basic questions about one particular human being:

Who am I?

Who were my parents?

Where did I come from?

Whom did I kill on the road?

Whose wife have I married?

Oedipus can solve the intellectual puzzle posed by the Sphinx. What he cannot do is see the hidden pattern of his own life.

Sophocles makes that limitation particularly unsettling because Oedipus is not stupid. If he were foolish, there would be little tragedy in watching him fail to understand.

He is intelligent enough to solve the mystery.

He simply does not yet know that solving it will destroy the identity of the detective.

Modern detective fiction usually conceals the solution. We read because we want to discover who committed the crime.

Sophocles does almost the opposite.

His audience largely knows who killed Laius. It knows who Oedipus’s real parents are. It knows that the prophecy has been fulfilled.

That changes the source of suspense.

We are not waiting to learn what happened.

We are watching Oedipus learn it.

Every apparently innocent piece of information therefore carries two meanings: the meaning Oedipus gives it and the meaning the audience already understands.

Jocasta mentions the crossroads and we know why it matters before Oedipus fully does. The Corinthian messenger thinks he is bringing reassuring information and instead destroys another part of Oedipus’s identity. The shepherd tries desperately not to answer questions because he knows that his answers will complete the pattern.

The investigation tightens like a noose.

And Sophocles makes Oedipus himself pull it tighter.

That may be more disturbing than an ordinary mystery precisely because there is no villain hiding the truth from the detective. By the end, almost everyone would prefer that Oedipus stop.

The obstacle standing between Oedipus and a merciful ignorance is Oedipus.

This is where the detective-story reading leads to a much larger question.

Why does Oedipus keep asking?

One answer is that he is proud. He has announced publicly that he will find Laius’s murderer, and retreat does not come easily to him.

But pride alone seems inadequate.

Oedipus also believes that truth matters.

Thebes is suffering because a concealed crime has polluted the city. From the beginning, Oedipus’s duty as king is to expose what has been hidden. He cannot restore order while allowing the truth about Laius’s death to remain buried.

Then the investigation becomes personal. Now he has another reason to continue. He needs to know who he is.

Jocasta offers him, in effect, the possibility of living without that knowledge. Stop asking. Accept uncertainty. Continue being Oedipus, king of Thebes.

He cannot.

There is something heroic in that refusal, even though it leads directly to catastrophe.

Sophocles therefore makes the pursuit of truth morally complicated. We ordinarily praise people for seeking truth and condemn them for hiding from it. Oedipus seeks it with extraordinary courage.

And the truth ruins him.

Would he have been better off not knowing?

The play never makes that an easy question.

Eventually the old shepherd speaks.

The pieces finally fit.

The infant condemned to die was Oedipus. Laius was his father. Jocasta is his mother. The stranger Oedipus killed on the road was the man whose murderer he has sworn to punish.

The detective has solved the case.

And in doing so, he has destroyed almost everything he believed about himself.

Yet there is one important thing the investigation has not destroyed: Oedipus’s determination to act.

He does not respond to the revelation by pretending the evidence is false. He does not conceal what he has discovered. He does not blame the witnesses for telling him.

The truth, once established, must be faced.

That helps explain why Oedipus remains such a powerful tragic figure. His catastrophe is not simply that terrible things happen to him. Nor is it simply that he makes mistakes.

His tragedy is connected to qualities we might otherwise admire: intelligence, courage, responsibility, persistence, and an unwillingness to settle for a comforting lie.

The qualities that enable Oedipus to discover the truth are the qualities that make discovering it inevitable.

By the end of Oedipus the King, the factual mystery has been solved.

But Sophocles leaves a harder mystery behind.

If Oedipus is admirable for insisting on the truth, how can the same insistence be part of what destroys him? If his confidence is dangerous, how do we separate it from the confidence that once saved Thebes? If he freely chooses to investigate, but every discovery carries him toward a fate determined long before the investigation began, where exactly does freedom end and fate begin?

Those questions cannot be solved as neatly as the murder of Laius.

Perhaps that is why the play has survived for so long.

The Sphinx poses a riddle, and Oedipus answers it.

Sophocles poses a more difficult one.

More than two thousand years later, we are still trying to solve it.
 

A. J. Quill is the editorial byline for original articles developed by Richer Resources Publications for the Classics Reference Library.