Creon and Antigone: Excessiveness

Both Creon and Antigone met their downfalls as a result of excessive belief in their own correctness. Anitgone’s defiance of the law to bury her brother was justified, but she took it too far in Scene 2 when she began to question not only the sense of Creon’s decree for Polyneices, but the legitimacy of his reign and the support for him. She said that those around Creon all were against him, but just restrained themselves. Antigone turned her righteous act into an anti-Creon psyche and lost her sense of the original purpose. Whether this resulted from hidden feelings about the relationship between Creon and her father/brother or from other reasons, this flaw caused Antigone to lose the full tragic heroine label because she began to turn the situation into something less noble than the original intent of putting a brother to rest.

Creon had a noble purpose in his actions because he wanted to protect the city and prevent mutiny for the future by using Polyneices as an example. He held to his intent too much and refused to listen to reason. As his son, Haimon, said, “It is not reason never to yield to reason!” (pg. 1441, line 79) Creon used reason to know that traitors must be punished to prevent further incidents, but he refused to acknowledge that his reason was flawed. He spent pages 1439-1440 ranting about how sons should yield to the reason of their fathers and rulers to justify himself. He could not admit that he was wrong and refused to listen to anything other than his own words. His flaw caused him to lose all that was dear to him and presents his situation as a tragic character because his flaw of hubris caused him to lose everything. The complexity lies in that his hubris that made him a tragic character caused the downfall and tragedy of another character, Antigone, resulting in a situation with two tragic heros/heroines. Creon, however, was humbled by his downfall, while Antigone remained steadfast in herself and wallowed in self-pity until death. Therefore, I believe that both Antigone and Creon are tragic characters because their respective flaws of the self-righteousness, which Nick discussed, caused their downfalls. Between the two, Creon was a truer tragedy because he was humbled by the gods to prove the point that several blogs have discussed, which is that the gods control fate and always win.