Oedipus Rex: Metaphors 2 key examples

The city of Thebes is both personified and compared to a ship struggling through a storm. Sophocles frequently compares Thebes to a ship and leading Thebes to captaining a ship, especially a ship in a storm. At the same time, the city is personified as a "she." This makes the suffering of the city—which is ultimately the collective suffering of many individual people—that much more visceral, ensuring that the human element of individual suffering is not lost in the grand figurative language describing the city.

The fact that the priest urges Oedipus to "see" emphasizes the ensuing metaphor while also conveying the importance of sight in a play that ends with blindness. The play has just begun, but already a religious figure is suggesting that Oedipus is in some way blind to the suffering that is occurring. In fact, the personification of the ship also suggests that the city is blind. The ship "cannot lift her head from the depths," or the ship's figurative head is stuck below the water. The Theban people's inability to escape the plague is metaphorically conveyed through this early instance of figurative language. At the beginning of the story, both Oedipus and the people of Thebes are figuratively blind.

This quotation by the Chorus occurs after Oedipus's argument with Creon. The /s/ in "land-storm-tossed," "shattered," "straight," "steer," and "storm" all contribute to this instance of alliteration. It is important to note that this alliteration is in the translated English and not the original Greek, which does not have an alliteration of "s" sounds. However, the alliteration is worth dwelling on nonetheless, in part because the repeated /s/ sounds emphasize the "storm." Throughout Oedipus Rex, storms are a recurring metaphor for the plight of the Theban people. They are stuck in a metaphorical storm at sea, and they need someone to steer them to safety.

The alliteration highlights the metaphor, which compares Oedipus to the helmsman of a ship. Although the reader is most likely aware of Oedipus's fate by this point in the play, the Chorus—or in other words, the people of Thebes—still have faith in their leader, as ignorant as Oedipus of what fate has in store for him. Figuratively speaking, the blind are leading the blind, and the people of Thebes have misplaced trust in their king and champion.

Simultaneously, Oedipus is the only one who can rid the Theban people of the curse that plagues them by leaving the city. The Chorus is then lamenting their fate to the correct person but for the wrong reasons, and the translator's alliteration sonically emphasizes this moment of disconnect by highlighting the Chorus's suffering. Indeed, repeated /s/ sounds sonically mimic the crashing of waves or the hissing of wind during a sea storm, as well as draw attention to the specific words that metaphorically describe the plight of Thebes.