How to Read Literature Like a Professor: Chapter 22 Summary & Analysis

In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (429 BC), Oedipus suffers from a tragic lack of self-awareness and foresight, leading him to accidentally fulfill a prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother. Throughout the play, Sophocles invokes imagery related to light and sight, but on discovering that he has unknowingly fulfilled the prophecy, he blinds himself in despair. As this narrative shows, when an author includes a blind character, this blindness is never simply a fact—it always has symbolic significance. Oedipus Rex is a perfect example of the meaning(s) that blindness can have, and it can demonstrate how “to look for the right questions” when reading literature.

Foster claims that although only some narratives contain literal blindness, all texts feature metaphoric representations of sight and blindness. We know that a characteristic such as blindness is important when it is introduced early. While there are exceptions to this rule (in Waiting for Godot, the blind character does not appear until Act 2), in general authors will draw particular attention to blind characters if they wish blindness to have major symbolic importance within the text.