David Smith
Sophocles’
Oedipus the King has been a very popular folk story for nearly 2500 years. The question immediately crops up, “Why has such a story lasted for over two millennia?”
At first glance, there is really very little that’s extremely noteworthy about Oedipus the King . It is an entertaining story, but history seems to point to some other cause for it’s great success. Plenty of equally entertaining stories have died or nearly died, and several works which seem downright boring have done better. So, if not due to entertainment value, it must be some literary tool or some part of the content. The main character does have an entire psychological theory named after him. Of course that has had some affect on the story’s popularity, but it’s rather unbelievable that a play would last 2500 years by telling the audience that they want to sleep with their mothers.
There is a simpler explanation that comes to mind, whatever truth may be in it. The audience always likes a good unexpected plot twist, and
Oedipus has twists to spare. Obviously, this wouldn’t apply to Sophocles’ interpretation of the story (as written for an audience that is already familiar with the story), but to the success of the folk tale as a whole. The audience begins the play seeing a town in a grave situation and an able leader already prepared to solve the situation. The audience is slowly given details, all of which appear disjointed and unrelated. As the end of the story approaches,
(actually only about two thirds of the way through in Sophocles’ version), everything comes together at once, in a way nobody hearing the story for the first time would expect. It is this sudden realization, this sudden “click” when all of the disconnected facts suddenly come together, that fascinates an audience. The true outcome can be greatly foreshadowed; the greater the foreshadowing and the longer it takes the audience to catch it, the greater the

David Smith effects of the twist. Each individual audience member realizes that indeed all of the prophecies had already come true in Oedipus , even as Oedipus toils to avoid them throughout the play. To someone who does not know the
Oedipus storyline, this realization, and it’s relatively late placement in the story, create a very entertaining literary tool.
This literary tool is not just confined to Oedipus’s time either.
Though a very early occurrence, it was probably not the first and most definitely not the last. Modern literature and entertainment use unexpected plot twists frequently to grab the audience’s attention. To cite a random recent example, The Sixth Sense based it’s entire entertainment value on a single plot twist at the very end of the movie. This twist was foreshadowed throughout the movie, but still kept away from the audience’s mainstream thought pattern. The writers filled the majority of the movie with slow, rather boring events, without making much visible progress in the plot. The entire audience opinion of The Sixth Sense was based on that single final plot twist. The result: an audience member, who spent half the movie bored, returns home with a very good feeling about the movie. The feeling is so strong, in fact, that the individual will tell many of his friends to go see the movie, just for the ending. If they tell him that they are unable or unwilling to see it, he will almost for sure give them a fifteen minute summary.
Hence, the propagation of a folk tale. Everyone must have enjoyed the experience of the unexpected ending to Oedipus the King so greatly, they told others about it…for 2500 years.