Becket - Jean Anouilh

The play is a re-enactment of the conflicts between King Henry II and Thomas Becket as the latter (Henry's best friend) ascends to power, becoming the King’s enemy.

Becket is the King's right hand man; clever, calculating and incapable of love the only quality Becket is unable to perfect is honor. Being a bastard and a saxon, honor is something he assumes he will never know. He bases his decisions on their aesthetic value rather than moral justification and seeks to be a form of stability to the King's erratic behavior. When the King and Becket come upon some peasants the King shouts at them as dogs and demands the daughter be taken to the palace for their pleasure. As the King rides away Becket tells the peasants to hide better next time and throws them a bag of coins for their troubles. Later when Becket is forced to give the King his mistress, Gwendolyn, for the King's amusement, the King brings in the peasant girl Becket was trying to protect and Becket decides he might as well go along with it and tells her to undress...when the King comes running in to say Gwendolyn has killer herself, being the first person who has truly been able to defy the King.

Nervous that the Church will grow too strong for the King to compete with, he decides to make Becket the Archbishop of Canterbury and allow the King to control the Church. Although he proffers his love for Becket, his love is a controlling, demanding love making everyone that succumbs to his love his pawn...and Becket denies him this pleasure. Upon his coronation as Archbishop, Becket becomes for the first time in his life free from all obligation except those of God, he is transformed into an ascetic who does his best to preserve the rights of the church against the king's power.

Ultimately, Becket is slaughtered by several of the king's nobles, and the king is then forced to undergo penance for the murder, mourning the death of the only person he truly loved.

Antigone - Sophocles

The play opens with the Oedipus prophesy coming to pass. His two sons have killed each other and Creon has refused to allow them a proper burial on punishment of death. Antigone, decides family fidelity comes before her duty to her kingdom and buries her brother anyway. Being caught in the act Creon decided she must die, but an added complication is that since she is the oldest remaining heir of Oedipus, Creon's son Haemon must marry her and prolong the lineage of her father. Creon decides to skip all that and entomb her in a cave where she will slowly starve to death...but she hangs herself and after Haemon discovers her body he kills himself.

Oedipus at Colonus - Sophocles

The second play in the trilogy find Oedipus and his daughter Antigone, after wandering around the wilderness finally approaching Colonus. Throughout the play Oedipus vehemently states that he is not responsible for the actions he was fated to commit. He argues his case before some older townsfolk and they agree to withhold judgement. When Theseus decides that Oedipus is not as disgusting and despicable as one would think and offers him citizenship in Colonus...at the end, after cursing his sons that they will die by each other hand, he decides to just end his life and after completing absolution of sorts disappears is a flash. Less plot and more philosophy in this play then its predecessor.

I almost had a flash back of Bigger from Richard Wright's "Native Son" while reading this. There is a similar amount of post-justification. And yet while Bigger argued that society had predestined his fate and his actions where therefore destined to happed...Oedipus is fighting against an oracle...And while society is not conclusive...it can't make you do anything...it can brainwash you into wanting to do things or making you think you either have free will or you don't have free will...yet ultimately one is a free agent and responsible for ones actions. Yet Oedipus did what anyone would have done in his position to defy fate and despite his best efforts still managed to participate in incest and patricide. Perhaps the only thing he could have done would have been to spend his life hiding from people and absolutely never marrying anyone just to be safe...

Oedipus the King - Sophocles

Oedipus as an infant is banished from his kingdom, his mother, Jocasta the Queen of Thebes having received a prophecy that he will grow up to marry his mother and kill his father, King Laius. As luck would have it he is adopted by king and queen of a neighboring country and raised as their own. When a similar prophesy is given to him he decides the most logical thing to do would be to get as far from his parents as possible in order to thwart fate. On the road he meets an argumentative man on a pilgrimage unwilling to give up the road. A scuffle takes place and in something akin to self defence, Oedipus kills the pilgrim and heads on toward the approaching kingdom. Upon his arrival the kingdom is up in arms and held hostage by a riddling witch. Oedipus solves the riddles and as a reward is given the kingdom, since King Laius has never returned. Oedipus then marries the widowed queen and everything seems as it should....and then he realizes he killed his father the pilgrim...and then he realizes he has married his mother and produced children that are his children/siblings....whereupon he gauges out his eyes and decides he must spend the rest of his life wandering through the wilderness with his daughter/sister.

Fate is a theme that often occurs in Greek writing, tragedies in particular, the concept of free will would have been foreign to a culture that espoused a religion of mercurial gods with ultimate power. The idea that attempting to avoid an oracle is the very thing which brings it about sets the stage for many Greek tragedies and becomes the foundation which many of the southern Gothic writers later explored. Oedipus the King is similar to Flannery O'Conner's "The Violent Bear It Away." Both Tarwater and Oedipus have been told their fate and both try to run away as far and as quick as possible and yet in the end both succumb to their destiny.

Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley

Rather than an actual plot, Huxley instead creates a mosaic on interwoven narratives. His characters are based on people he new...but since I didn't take the time to research each characters counterpart...I think I probably missed some of the humor. There seems to be a lot of upper class British angst that filters through each narrative and perhaps is the underlying theme.

"Six months from now her baby would be born. Something that had been a single cell, a cluster of cells, a little sac of tissue, a kind of worm, a potential fish with gills, stirred in her womb and would day become a man - a grown man, suffering and enjoying, loving and hating, thinking, remembering, imagining. And what had been a blob of jelly within her body would invent a god and worship; what had been a kind of fish would create and, having created, would become the battle-ground of disputing good and evil; what had blindly lived in her as a parasitic worm would look at the starts, would listen to music, would read poetry."

Nobody can paint a nude who hasn't learnt the human body by heart with his hands and his lips and his own body.

His love was one long tacit apology for itself.

The hairy endings of the auditory nerve shuddered like weeds in a rough sea; a vast number of obscure miracles were performed in the brain, and Lord Edward ecstatically whispered 'Bach!' "