Oedipus The King Essay Example for Free

Oedipus The King Essay Oedipus is written as a play, there is no narrator, Sophocles explains the story line and then runs the story into playwright. I like this point of view because it can sometimes be more clear to the reader. There are many points of view in this play. That is there are many different individuals addressed this playwright. Thus there are many different points of view. I think that Oedipus generally speaks in place of a narrator, because he is the main character. I believe he expresses some of the things that Sophocles is trying to say to the audience. An example of this is when he says: Speak out, speak to us all. I grieve for these, my people, far more that I fear for my own life. (Sophocles, 395) I think that Sophocles is trying to get people to speak their own mind, come together, and establish a community. He is saying this through Oedipus. Oedipus goes through many changes. He goes through a state of innocence or ignorance, then through a state of denial and finally a state of acceptance and guilt. Throughout these different stages in his life, he reveals to his audience who he really is. Oedipus believing he is innocent is part of the form in this play. Oedipus has come to the throne of Thebes by solving the Riddle of the Sphinx. There is a plague upon Thebes which Oedipus desires to heal. Creon returns to the palace after his visit to the Pythian House of Phoebus, an oracle. The oracle has said that the only way to cure the illness in Thebes is to find the man whom killed Laius, the previous king of Thebes. Odeipus tries to discover the murderer and requests that the murderer come forward and promises that instead of being killed, he will be banished from Thebes. If any man comes forward with the murderer he will be rewarded and if any guilty man is found and has not confessed, the murderer will be banished from all aspects of society. Tiresias, an aged, blind prophet is brought to Oedipus to reveal the murderer. Tiresias says that Oedipus unknowingly killed Laius. Disbelieving this, Oedipus blames Creon for plotting this against him to gain the throne  of Thebes. Tiresias states his innocence and before he leaves the palace, he gives Oedipus a riddle: The murderer seemed an alien is really a native to Theban, was once poor and now is rich, is the brother of his children and the child of his wife, the heir to his fathers bed and the cause of his fathers death. The form in this part of the play, plays into the certain buildup of the plot. Now Creon comes to the palace after hearing of Oedipus charges against him. Oedipus questions Creon as to why Tiresias didnt come forward when the initial investigation of Laius death occured. Creon says he is happy with his position in court and has no desire to take the throne from Oedipus. He tells Oedipus that for proof he can go to the oracle at Pytho and ask if Creon is telling the truth. Jocasta, Oedipus wife, tells him that an oracle came to Laius saying that he would die by the hand of his child. Learning this Laius has his newborn son tied at the ankles and taken away to be killed. She says that Laius was killed by robbers on his way to the oracle at Delphi at the place where three roads meet. The content of this play is that of Greek tragedy, son of Laius, king of Thebes, and his wife, Jocasta. Laius had been warned by an oracle that he was fated to be killed by his own son; he therefore abandoned Oedipus on a mountainside. The baby was rescued, however, by a shepherd and brought to the king of Corinth, who adopted him. When Oedipus is grown, he learns from the oracle that he would kill his father and marry his mother. He fled Corinth to escape this fate, believing his foster parents to be his real parents. At a crossroad Oedipus encountered Laius(his father), and killed him. He continued on to Thebes, where the Sphinx was talking and all who could not solve her riddle. Oedipus answered it correctly and so he won the widowed queens hand(his mother). The prophecy was fulfilled. Two sons, Polynices and Eteocles, and two daughters, Antigone and Ismene, were born to the unwittingly incestuous pair. When a plague descended on  Thebes, an oracle declared that the only way to rid the land of its illness was to expel the murderer of Laius. Through a series of painful revelations, the king learned the truth and in an agony of horror blinded himself. His daughters, Antigone and Ismene, are left in the hands of Kreon, who proves to be a true friend of Oedipus. The content of this play regarding time is that the time wasnt very specific, but it does say that Sophocles lived from 496-406 BC. The place on the other hand is very specific, it introduces you saying: The royal house of Thebes. Double doors dominate the facade, a stone altar stands at the center of the stage. Many years have passed since Oedipus has solved the riddle of the Sphinx and ascended the throne of Thebes, and now a plague has struck the city. A procession of priests enters ¦(Sophocles, 392) I think that this introduction leads the reader into a world of curiosity. We really dont know what is going to happen to Oedipus, all we know is there is a plague across the town that Oedipus must do something about. This leads the reader into Oedipus stages of innocence or ignorance, denial and finally guilt. The content in the choice of setting affects the theme because it makes this story more believable, in a time unfamiliar to us, long ago.

Reducing Logistic Costs for Ladner Building Products Essay -- Business

Reducing Logistic Costs for Ladner Building Products Introduction: Ladner is a National building materials distributor with 15-distribution centres nation wide. Recently, the company had been experiencing a loss due to high costs. This issue has become a dangerous problem at Ladner, and top management is now looking to understand the causes of this problem. Recommendations: Ladner can take one or a combination of the following options to improve its situation: - Reducing transportation costs by re-organizing the deliveries and encouraging pick-ups. - Changing staff evaluation methods so that they are aware of costs involved in Ladner's processes. - Changing and re-organizing the customer and product base. Analysis of transportation process: It is easy to see from a first look at exhibit 3 and exhibit 4 (that are provided in the readings) that the delivery process always produces losses. The total cost is always more than what the customer is charged. This is mainly due to customer rebates on delivery charges. Which means this loss in the delivery process is eating up from the profit margins of the company. Ladner has a few options here. They can cancel all delivery rebates for all future deliveries (or reduce them), they can increase the charge on deliveries, and/or they can organize their deliveries better to reduce costs. The latter option is more favourable and is discussed in the following three paragraphs. Taking the Ontario region as an example that represents all regions, one can analyze the two transportation costs: when transporting to a local customer, and when transporting to a customer in a rural region. (See exhibit D) For local runs, the carriers were paid a high hourly salary ($34), and a relatively low per kilometre rate ($0.37). As a result, for Ladner to reduce its transportation costs for local runs, it should minimize the travelling time. In other words, each time the courier should make one trip to serve all customers who are located in the same area and make as many drops as possible. Moreover, it would be useful here to find out what?s the longest segment in the process of delivering to customers? Is it the trip to a certain area, or the drop-off time? If it was the drop-off time, then maybe the deliveries should be organized to minimize drop-offs. Maybe Ladner should... ...afely assume that it can increase its market share in any product if enough effort and promotion is put into it). It will be useful here to find out what are the actual numbers for this trade off? Then Ladner can form a strategy to increase overall profit margins by changing the customer base. For example, if the costs of storage and handling are relatively higher, then Ladner could try to increase sales of industrial products, which have a relatively high profit margin and medium SKU space requirements. On the other hand, it could reduce sales of allied products, which have high SKU space requirements. This product base management can be done in an indirect way as well. It is mentioned in the case that Ladner?s sales staff are evaluated on the basis of product gross margins. This ignores the costs of handling, storage and transportation. Ladner?s management can introduce a new evaluation method that would include these costs. The end result would be that sales representatives would try to sell the most profitable product to the most profitable customer after taking into consideration all the costs. In other words, better customer and product base selection.

Playboy of the Western World

The Playboy of the Western World gains its title from the scene in which Christy can't be beaten in play at any of the village sports, hence he becomes the â€Å"playboy. † The phrase â€Å"of the Western World† leads the way into Synge's theme of Irish mythmaking, then still especially noticeable in unsophisticated peasant groups. With the inclusion of this phrase, the myth of the playboy encompasses the whole world. Mythmaking deviates from reality, as is made clear by the stretch of the title: Irish village game championship can't possibly trump an entire world of athletes. Synge isn't discussing a universal theme but rather exposing a particularly Irish theme, that of mythmaking. The play opened in January of 1907 at Yeats's Irish Literary Theatre to outraged indignation and riots but over the course of the twentieth century has gained ever greater currency among critics. Had Yeats not held a public debate on the concept of artistic freedom, The Playboy may have died an ignoble death. As it happens, though, the play has by later critics been called â€Å"the most rich and copious store of character since Shakespeare’’ (P. P. Howe) and a play â€Å"riotous with the quick rush of life, a tempest of the passions† (Charles A. Bennett). These seem to be the reasons that The Playboy of the Western World has current appeal. Whereas original audiences cared about morality and decorous representations of peoples and countries, the increasing and ever increasing reach for realism, ethnic diversity and authentic representations has brought The Playboy into vogue because it was the avant garde and the precursor of what is presently valued and sought after: unveiled realism. Incidentally, one might argue that this unveiled realism, which is the idol of the present milieu, has been carried so far that â€Å"realism† is now a fancy in that it is a reality beyond reality and that it carries such clout that it is creating new reality (of questionable benefit) in its wake, which is a divergent reality from the realism that Synge depicted after living with, studying and capturing in three acts the cultural and psychological realities on the Aran Islands, from which he derived The Playboy of the Western World.

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