Halfway through the play, the chorus highlights the stillness at the heart of tragedy. What is the significance of the stillness in the play? stillness appears as a key metaphor in the chorus's comments on the nature of tragedy. This stillness is apiece with the spring like tension and sense of suspense in tragedy that it evokes earlier. Tragedy's stillness appears in the moment before the execution, the moment at the beginning of a play before the consummation of a love affair. The stillness of sex and death is precisely where the play's two lovers will ultimately end, lain together in the tomb that figures also as their bridal bed. Tragic stillness is the silence within the spectator when the crowd acclaims the victor.

This stillness within perhaps recalls the hollow space imagined by antigone earlier. This inner silence turns the outer world into no more than a picture, a film without a sound track. This dissociation of sound from the image of the world is a dissociation of the spectator from that world as well. Again, two disjunctions are at work here: that of the sound from the image and the spectator from the world become image. The chorus shifts from a theatrical to filmic metaphor here because these experiences of disjunction are inherent to mdash though covered over in mdash the cinematic apparatus. The spectator is then identified with the already vanquished victor, who is similarly alone in a desert of silence, similarly disjoined from the world.

This disjunction from the world is the plight of the tragic hero and spectator who identifies himself with him. Most of antigone 's commentators cast the play as an anti fascist allegory of events of the french resistance. How might one consider the play in such terms? what are some of the limits of this reading? written in the heat of world war ii, antigone is generally received as an allegory on the nazi occupation and the heroism of resistance. According to this reading, creon would figure as the collaborationist ruler, marshall p tain or otherwise, forced into the most loathsome practices in having said yes to state power. Though creon has broken the back of the resistance in thebes, antigone would figure as the lone resistant who subverts state authority nevertheless.

Moreover, as the cowardly ismene's ultimate recantation suggests, her resistance is dangerous contagious. He must kill her because the throne demands it of him he has submitted his will to the law. Anouilh also conjures the specter of the howling mob that calls for antigone's blood, the mob that creon rules and remains subject to.

Essays on Earthquakes

Despite these provocative correspondences between the play and the text of politics, numerous differences persist between antigone and political allegory. In contrast to conventional readings of the antigone legend, anouilh's antigone does not defend her act of rebellion in the name of filial, religious, or even moral integrity. This insistence becomes especially clear in the course of her confrontation with creon. In asking why and in whose name antigone has rebelled, creon will progressively strip antigone's act of its external motivations.

Antigone will have no just cause, or no human reason for bringing herself to the point of death. Instead, she acts in terms of her desire, a desire she clings to despite its madness. Just as she always played with water, ate from all the plates at once, or went swimming at dawn, she will bury polynices. Refusing to understand those around her, she will follow her desire to her demise. Ultimately antigone's insistence on her desire removes her from the human community. Antigone does not act in the name of political resistance but in that of her desire.